About Paula

American linguist living in Edmonton, AB. I study the lexicon and vocabulary acquisition, mostly from psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, and computational perspectives.

Father’s Day special: The language of my dad

Posted on June 15, 2012 by Paula

In honor of Father’s Day, I thought I’d write a bit about language and my dad. It’s a relevant topic because, for a middle-class, monolingual, white American male, language and communication styles are highly salient characteristics of my dad. The four most noteworthy traits I can think of are: his penchant to correct people for their language use, his vocabulary knowledge, his public speaking skills, and his ease in talking to strangers.

Correcting people. To some people, my dad can come off as intimidating. I’ll admit it: I can be one of those people. One of the reasons is no doubt because he’s not afraid to correct people, anybody as far as I can tell, when they make a language “error” (in scare quotes because we linguists tend not to think of things in terms of errors, but rather as, say, non-canonical constructions). Hell, I am a grown woman with a Ph.D. in linguistics, and he still corrects me if I say something “wrong”. Example: for the longest time after I came back from living in France, I would use the word majoritarily. It is a clear transfer from the French majoritairement, meaning, well, majoritarily (okay, if you really want to know, it means something like predominantly). Nobody else said anything when I would say majoritarily, which was quite common as I remember thinking it was le mot juste in several occasions. Perhaps this was because they understood it just fine — it is, after all, a fairly morphologically transparent coinage — or perhaps it’s because they thought it was a word that they just weren’t familiar with. I remember my shock, and also exactly where we were (on a walk coming up the hill back to the house), when Dad just came out and said it: “Majoritarily isn’t a word, Paula.” What? Was he kidding? “I’m sure it is, Dad.” I proceeded to do the derivation orally: “You know, majority, and then majoritary, and then majoritarily.” Alas, the French had influenced my English too much: the only English word that comes close to what I had in mind is majoritarian, which has a much more restricted meaning than I had in mind: the Oxford American defines it as “governed by or believing in decision by a majority”. I do not remember if we looked up majoritarily together as soon as we got home, or if I looked it up myself. I do remember, however, feeling crushed when I discovered that it was not, in fact, an English word. I hate to be wrong, and the fact that it’s a domain so close to home, words, just drives the knife in a little harder.

That said, I am happy my dad alerts me to the idiosyncrasies of my language, shall we say. Most people will not tell you about your flaws, linguistic or otherwise. It is a bitter pill to swallow when such flaws are made apparent, but in the end I would much rather be made aware of them than not, and the fact that it’s my father who clues me in means that the correction comes from a place of love, in a setting in which I am not judged (well, at least not too judged). Had Dad not alerted me to the fact that majoritarily isn’t a word, I might still be using it with any and all anglophones. Which, mind you, is just a perfectly natural phenomenon and in fact is the kind of stuff I study, but in professional contexts, it might come off as weird to be using made-up words that, well, aren’t deliberately made-up. So, thank you Dad for letting me know about majoritarily.

Vocabulary. My dad has a fairly extensive vocabulary. I’m talking both active vocabulary (the words he himself uses) and passive vocabulary (the words he knows, as is evidenced by the many definitions he has cited for us kids over the years). To varying extents, people moderate their choice of words according to the context or the words they think their listeners will know. My dad does this less than most people, I’d say — either that, or he is seeking to expose his children to new words. Just last weekend, he busted out ersatz in talking about a food item we all felt to be of inferior quality than normal. Of course I know what ersatz means. But my 19-year-old sister who’s not the bookish type, not so much. We then proceeded to discuss ersatz for at least a couple of minutes, going over several plausible and implausible examples, so it was nice a learning opportunity. The word ersatz has the potential to be a running family joke for quite some time.

Another word that has made its way into family lore is esoteric. One night, my step-mom, dad, and I were at a bar, where he was talking with an acquaintance of theirs. He asked her what she had been up to lately, and she said, “I’ve been reading a lot of books on Jewish mysticism.” Dad said, “Oh, that’s pretty esoteric.” At which point I gave Dad a nudge under the table. “Dad!” “What?” he said. “You can’t just say that somebody’s reading preferences are esoteric! Esoteric has kind of a negative connotation, you know, like when you say ‘That’s so esoteric’, it never means it’s a good thing.” Most times I hear esoteric, it’s in a context of something being so limited in scope that it’s not interesting to the general population, and by extension that it’s not interesting at all, except for nerds.

“I disagree,” he said. “I think it’s got a pretty objective connotation and just has to do with specialized knowledge.” “Oh really?” I responded, inviting a scenario that would come to haunt me. “I’m pretty sure it does have a negative sense. Would you care to place a wager on that, and we can figure it out when we get home?” (This was before the iPhone era.) We settled on a bet of lunch and decided that we would use the home dictionary to settle the matter. A dictionary was not, I felt, the best way to get at the connotation of a word, but such subtleties are sometimes included, and anyway, my family was not going to think a usage query with e.g. Google would be legit.

To my dismay, the definition of esoteric that we looked up corresponds to that of m-w.com, given below:

Alas, Merriam Webster’s definitions for “esoteric” are not indicative of a negative connotation.

None of the definitions included anything about a negative connotation, but I still felt (and still feel to this day) that esoteric has a negative connotation. So, I graciously admitted defeat — at least I thought I was being gracious — by saying something like, “Dad, you win. By our dictionary criterion, esoteric does not have a negative connotation, and therefore I am happy to take you out to lunch. However, I maintain that esoteric does in fact have a negative connotation, so perhaps this is a feature of language change and younger people might be likely to think more like me. Let’s check The Google for usage patterns.” This response did not go over well. I was labeled a “sore loser” by my family, yet from my perspective, I had admitted defeat, and all I wanted to do was get to the bottom of the question by checking out usage data. I suppose you could say I was being stubborn, but this is a recurring issue between my family and me (excluding my brother, who has a tendency to nerd out like me). They think, “Give it up already, Paula”, and I think such an attitude does not encourage deeper learning or appreciation of an issue. Over the years, I have come to accept their side of things, and it’s not a major problem. It just means I don’t share that aspect of my personality with them, and that I do my Google searches furtively.

My dad very much enjoys learning new slang. About a year ago, he learned the more recent use of random, meaning something like “odd, strange, or out of the blue”. When my dad heard my sister and I using random in that sense, he said, “Now, you two are using random in a way I’m not familiar with. You’re not referring to something that is governed by chance in the mathematical sense, right?” We told him about the new meaning of the word. I for one have memories of when random did not have this newer meaning, but my 23-year-old sister does not. In my most recent visit with him, Dad learned the corresponding rando (a person who behaves in the new sense of randomly). Dad said, “Now, I’ve heard of random, but what is rando?” So cute. We also recently taught him baller and ballin’. I don’t quite think he gets them yet, but he will. Words take time to sink in.

Public speaking. At various points I have seen my dad give speeches to groups of people. He’s very good at it. This is no doubt a result of his job: at one point he was a public defender. Now he doesn’t do trial law any more, but he does still give talks and teaches occasionally. For me, his public speaking skills are one sign of his deep professional commitment. I feel like at least professionally I’ve grown up with my dad: I’ve been to all his offices except the first one he had, and I remember each one. When my parents divorced and I only saw my dad every other weekend, we would still go to his office on Saturdays while he did a bit of work. I don’t remember what I did there; I probably read as reading was my default childhood activity. I’m happy to have had the opportunity to see both my parents on the job as it has probably contributed to me having a strong work ethic. Anyway, I don’t have any memorable moments of my father giving a talk (those are more reserved for his late mother), I simply appreciate his ease of addressing the audience, his jokes, and his conversational tone. Whenever I have to give a talk for which I am nervous, my mantra beforehand is, “I am my father’s daughter.” It helps give me confidence.

I am my father’s daughter.

Talking to strangers. No conversation of language and my father would be complete if it didn’t mention my dad’s facility (or, as my siblings might say, “habit”) for talking with strangers. Dad will very often initiate conversations with people we don’t know, like the waitress, the cab driver, the person ahead of us in line. He does it more than most people, I’d say. This used to embarrass my siblings to no end when they were teenagers (“Oh god, he’s doing it again”), perhaps particularly because he often shakes hands and introduces himself with not only his first but his last name. I have come to appreciate it though, and perhaps they will too. Perhaps they already do. In this respect too am I my father’s daughter: I talk to strangers all the time. With the hand-shaking and saying his last name when it’s not strictly necessary, he again serves as a model for us in professional contexts.

I used to think talking to strangers came easily to him, as he looks quite natural when doing it, and comes across as very sincere. I was pretty surprised a couple of years ago when my step-mom told us engaging strangers in conversation is something he’s had to devote explicit attention to, because he didn’t feel it came easily for him and he wanted to be better at this skill for professional reasons. But at the end of the day, my dad is not really at home in large groups of people.

Of all my parents (I think of myself as having three, my mom, my dad, and my step-mom), I communicate the least with my dad. Perhaps like many men, the best way to catch up with him is not by talking via distance, but by sharing time and space with him. For my dad, the best time together is probably spent on the golf course, and since I don’t play golf, I feel there is a part of my dad that I miss out on. Not that being on the golf course would mean we would talk a lot though: as I recently told him, “Dad, I would go golfing with you just to watch, but I don’t like getting shushed all the time.” On the golf course, my dad has pretty strict rules about when you can and can’t talk. So it’s not like the bonding is that verbal there either. Silent bonding doesn’t come naturally to me: I am after all a linguist. Yet I am trying to appreciate silent time spent with others more, and so in this sense as well my dad is again a great teacher.

Hip-hop is so misunderstood. For real.

Posted on March 12, 2012 by Paula

I went to see a new documentary recently put out by the National Film Board of Canada, United States of Africa. In it, the director, Yanick Letourneau, basically follows around a Senegalese hip-hop artist, Didier Awadi, as he creates a hip-hop album entitled Présidents d’Afrique; much of the film is a meditation on the role of hip-hop in politics, particularly African politics. The film was excellent, as is the album. But one thing about the film wasn’t excellent: its introduction (since the film was part of a festival here in Edmonton, a person talked about the film before the showing). The dude had good intentions, but in placing the movie in the broader context of the hip-hop cultural movement, he missed the mark, both objectively and perhaps more fundamentally. His argument went something like this: “We kind of took a risk in showing this film because of the association with this music and violence. Well, I just want to say that this film is not like that. This film is about hip-hop. It is not about rap, like gangsta rap and violence and all that other stuff related to rap. It’s important to clarify what hip-hop is compared to rap, because a lot of people don’t see the transformative power of hip-hop to be a force for good in the world. That’s what this film is about.” Okay, he didn’t explicitly say that they took a risk in showing this film, but it was pretty obvious from everything else he did say. What was also obvious was that he thought hip-hop was fairly misunderstood, that it was associated with violence, and that he wanted to correct this misunderstanding.

As you can imagine, I had a bit of a problem with this intro; the fact that I’m writing about it a week later means the problem hasn’t gone away. First, this guy’s distinction between hip-hop and rap was just plain wrong, and second, it is wrong to associate hip-hop or rap, or whatever you want to call the genre, with purely negative social phenomena, and to do so euphemistically, potentially with classist or racist undertones. I’ll get back to that second point in a bit. First, it seems lots of people don’t know the difference between hip-hop and rap. I say this having written an academic paper on hip-hop, in which even the reviewers were not clear about this distinction, so it’s not just my friend from the film festival.

Hip-hop vs. rap. I’m not even quite sure how to classify homeboy’s distinction of hip-hop vs. rap, other than on some evaluative dimension like “hip-hop is good, rap is violent and therefore bad”. Hip-hop, as anybody who’s curious enough to look up the term on Wikipedia will see, is a term for a cultural movement encompassing visual art (graffiti), dancing (b-boying), and music. The musical component is twofold, DJ-ing and MC-ing. So in theory, when people talk about the musical element of the movement, they should say something like “hip-hop music”. But realistically, that’s kind of long and thus annoying, and it’s usually clear from the context that only the musical component is being discussed, hence the shortening of the musical genre to simply “hip-hop”. Perhaps because of this use of terminology, many people have started using the term hip-hop for only the music and are not aware that the broader cultural movement also bears this name.

But back to the music. A DJ spins records, and an MC presides over a show. In hip-hop, DJ-ing started as a way of extending and repeating the break of popular songs; MCs of parties would talk over the records. The talking, however, would generally be rhythmic, like spoken poetry — it would be rapping (here again, a Wiki search suffices to kill the curiosity). That is, ladies and gentleman, rapping is the spoken component to hip-hop songs. It has its origins in the African-American oral tradition, and thanks to hip-hop, it is probably the most popular form of poetry actively listened to in the U.S., if not the world.

Thus the distinction between hip-hop and rap is more like a part-whole relationship than a sub-genre classification, like gangsta rap vs. the rest of hip-hop. Why then, you ask, is gangsta rap not called gangsta hip-hop? According to this site, Dr. Dre invented the term gangsta rap music to describe the albums he produced. I haven’t read the Rolling Stone article cited on that page, so I can’t say what was going on in his head when he came up with this term, or if that’s even the right etymology. But perhaps he wanted his music to be marketable to mainstream audiences, who often think of the musical genre as rap, not hip-hop, particularly back in the early 1990s.

Clearly as a linguist I’m aware that the meanings of words change over time and across social groups. So at the end of the day I don’t really care if you refer to the music as hip-hop or rap, as long as you and your listener understand each other. But it does bother me to see a false dichotomy created to discuss the music, and worse, a false dichotomy in which neither side is fully explained, but in which one side is judged as having fairly negative associations, which people often euphemistically dance around.

Hip-hop is so misunderstood. It seems that one way in which to go about talking about such associations is to phrase the problem in terms of how misunderstood the genre is. You, dear listener, who may or may not associate hip-hop with negative social phenomena, if only you would hear some “decent” hip-hop — and by decent, I mean uplifting, positive, or funny — then clearly you would stop thinking about violence and the like when you think about hip-hop. The movie introducer invoked this trope when discussing hip-hop, while at the same time failing to mention what exactly “rap” is, other than gangsta rap, which he sees as negative. Here is another example of the “hip-hop is so misunderstood” trope: the Edmonton hip-hop artist The Joe was on local TV in early 2011, and the host, wanting to make The Joe’s music as relevant as possible to his viewers, said (6:00 – 6:10), “I think a lot of people might have a misconception of what rap is… uh, if you want proof, of exactly how excellent this work is, keep it locked right here…” This statement was promptly followed by a cut to a commercial. Like before, the misconception isn’t followed by a well-defined conceptualization of hip-hop (here “rap” again, although interestingly he does use both terms in seemingly free variation to me throughout the interview). Instead, what follows is an implication that hip-hop, unlike the current work being discussed, is usually not excellent.

Because these claims are pretty vague, it’s difficult to see what the speaker thinks hip-hop is, and specifically, what is so misunderstood and/or not excellent about the genre. I will hazard a few guesses though, based on people who actually say what they don’t like (some) hip-hop for: the emphasis on violence, the braggadocio, the ostentatious/”pimp” lifestyle, the swear words, the misogyny, the homophobia. These are some serious claims, and so to do them justice I’ve just been focusing on one: the violence in hip-hop songs, since if anything the movie introducer seemed to associate the genre with violence.

One of the overarching themes of the hip-hop is that it is a mechanism for underrepresented peoples to express themselves. Hip-hop started in the U.S. as music by Blacks and Hispanics, but it has expanded to a worldwide scene in which, for example, African hip-hop artists use it to critique their government on behalf of politically oppressed people, as seen in United States of Africa. And a sad-but-true correlate of being underrepresented, as for example an ethnic minority group often is, is lower socio-economic status and higher rates of violence.

I once got in a huge fight with a friend about the universal appeal of different genres of music. Well, he might say it was about gangsta rap vs. I dunno, indie rock and slowcore. His point was that he hated the negativity of gangsta rap, as exemplified by the gruesome discussion of violence, particularly that aimed at police officers. He felt like music with such themes did not have the universal appeal that the often introspective lyrics of his favorite bands, such as Low, have. My point was simply that the music we listen to and like is a product of our own socio-cultural experiences and biases, not just our emotive side and hankering for good beats. For God’s sake, both he and Low are from Minnesota! How much more of a shared experience can you get? I then asked him what hip-hop artists he did like: Atmosphere. “That’s another Minnesota group!” I yelled. “And their lyrics are extremely comprehensible to you!”

I personally have no gangsta rap in my music collection and know very little about the sub-genre, so I’m probably the worst person to talk about it, let alone defend it. I do know that some prominent African-Americans, such as Spike Lee, do not like gangsta rap because they feel it is the 21st century minstrel show. I get that. Violence sells, and perhaps some artists are taking advantage of this fact. But still, if the streets are going to be violent, as is the case in too many inner-city communities, then to some extent it’s only natural that hip-hop artists from these communities would discuss violence in their songs, and would do so in a variety of ways. But for me personally, Eminem’s lyrics are some of the most violent you can get, yet he’s not associated with gangsta rap. In fact, I feel that for the level of violence portrayed in Eminem’s songs, he gets off pretty easily.

That hip-hop artists talk a lot about violence, if indeed they do so more than other genres of music, should not be viewed as something regrettable about the genre, but rather about our culture: inner cities are often violent; furthermore, this narrative sells. Hip-hop, then, is simply a reflection of our culture at large. It is perhaps these inconvenient truths that are too difficult to discuss, and which are the true reason for which “hip-hop is so misunderstood”.

A kinder, gentler workspace

Posted on December 17, 2011 by Paula

When I wrote recently about my treadmill desk, most of the feedback was positive. Sure I got a few hamster-slave comments, but really? Anyway, the second leg in my tripod of healthy backdom, a more ergonomic sitting workspace, is no less important. It is however perhaps a bit less sexy. So I expect some laughs but don’t really care: ergonomics needs to happen. Ladies and gentleman, let me push the envelope of coolness.

As a grad student, I worked more from home than I do now, so my home workspace is more developed than my office workspace. The eventual goal is to have an office workspace that’s as just as ergonomic. But in the meantime, and frankly until I get another cat to keep Billie Jean company while I’m gone at work a lot, I’m focusing on the home side of things.

Without further ado then, let me show you what my home setup looks like. The crucial points are the split keyboard, the vertical mouse, the wrist rest, the computer stand, the book stand, and the pièce de résistance, my super-ergonomic chair (scroll down, dear reader). The MacBook Air was also an explicit ergonomic choice — its light weight makes it great for carrying around in a backpack — but that’s really all there is to say about that. I hasten to add that I’m not pushing specific products in any way; they’re just good solutions I’ve found and want to share them. I’m interested in hearing what works for others.

My home workspace on a given day. Yes I have a teddy bear on my desk -- doesn't everyone? Her name is Bertie, and she's a Steiff. A present from my grandma who collected teddy bears.

1. Split keyboard

Perhaps what jumps out at you first in looking at my home workspace is the split keyboard. I tell people I have a split keyboard and they’re like, “Oh me too” and then they’re inevitably talking about a pseudo-split like this:

Bitch please, with your pseudo-ergonomic keyboard!

In terms of benefit, I’d say the pseudo-split gives you about a 10 – 20 % improvement tops over a traditional keyboard. I initially thought about getting such a keyboard, but I never actually felt an improvement when using it. When you use my split keyboard, you actually feel instantaneous relief in your upper back, most notably in your rhomboid muscles. Your what? These things:

Apologies for the ass, but this was the best pic of the rhomboids I could find. Courtesy of physioadvisor.com.au.

As you can imagine with the constantly winged position that a regular keyboard requires, the rhomboids are always stretched to the limit, while your pecs are all crunched up all the time. The keyboard I have, the Kinesis Freestyle Solo Keyboard for Macs, has 8 inches of split. This means that in the typing position, your arms extend naturally, without any winging of the shoulder blades that is a major occupational hazard of the desk job. As soon as people try my splittie, they feel a difference. The refamiliarization necessary with this keyboard is minimal.

Another keyboard I considered was the Kinesis Advantage, the Cadillac of keyboards:

The Kinesis Advantage, the Cadillac of keyboards.

The Advantage still has the essential split, but, true to its name, it has four more advantages:

It incorporates an angle so that your thumbs are slightly higher than your pinky fingers. I’ll talk about this more when I get to my vertical mouse.
The keys are closer together, so your fingers don’t have to travel as far when leaving the home keys. I don’t have big hands or long fingers, so fat-fingering would not be a problem for me. However, I’ve been told by those who do that because of the curve to the keyboard, they don’t fat-finger either.
It ACTUALLY MAKES USE OF YOUR THUMBS. Why do no other keyboards appropriately exploit thumbs? All I EVER push with my thumbs is this big-ass space bar. WHICH DOES NOT NEED TO BE SO BIG! Do you see all these CAPS? That means I am YELLING, I THINK IT’S SO STUPID! Gah.
It comes in a Dvorak version. I’m working up to using the Dvorak keyboard (see below).

With all these advantages then, why did I not get The Advantage? For the one drawback: the price. It costs around $300, while my trusty Freestyle was $100. Now that I’m no longer a grad student, I can afford The Advantage, although there are a million other things I also have to get, like a new laptop to use on my treadmill desk…

Note that Kinesis also has some other less expensive models, the most intriguing to me being, naturally, the Ascent:

Ascent me up, Scotty!

It’s crazy! But totally logical, as we’ll soon see with my vertical mouse. Although I do worry that you would need arm support as you type. You can’t just extend them for hours on end without any support!

2. Vertical mouse

You might not have noticed this in looking at my workstation, but my mouse is actually an Evoluent vertical mouse, the closest a mouse can come to being a hand massage.

My vertical mouse. No that's not my hand!

Why is a vertical mouse important, you ask? So you don’t have an unnaturally twisted arm like the one shown below:

Bad twisted arm. Bad.

With the vertical mouse, you’re basically making the same natural motion that you would make when extending your arm for a handshake. To be honest, I don’t do a lot of mousework, so this was kind of a splurge. But not like a chocolate-cake kind of splurge, a healthy splurge. It’s the same logic behind the tilt in any ergonomic keyboard, particularly the Ascent but also the Advantage.

3. Wrist rest

The newest addition to my workspace is my wrist rest. Without it, I was definitely feeling pressure on my wrists as my arms fell off the desk. It wasn’t painful, just not comfortable. But long-term problems can result from many hours per day of pressure on a particular area, particularly one like the wrists where nerves are so close to the point of pressure. Basically, what happens is that over time your nerve, experiencing constant pressure on it, just decides it’s fed up and goes numb. Not fun.

4. Computer stand

Lots of people have a computer stand and external keyboard these days. Good. The idea is to benefit your neck: instead of always looking down, and without the unfortunate turtle-asana position of sticking out your neck that I see way too often, you have a relaxed gaze at the screen as your neck stays in a neutral position.

Turtleasana, a posture I see way too often in laptop-users.

You might think, "Why is she showing me some random dude who has terrible posture?" Because that's what a lot of hipsters I see at cafés look like too. Modulo the Dockers. Courtesy of http://blog.mysanantonio.com/chadelms/ .

Where, you ask, is this sweet spot of natural gaze? Well, a neutral position for your neck is like how it is when you’re standing. Then look straight ahead, parallel to the floor. The top of your computer should meet up with this imaginary line. Mine doesn’t quite, which means my own computer stand should probably be a tad higher. My laptop stand does have settings that go to a 40° incline; currently it’s at 30°. But alas, the MacBook Air, and most Macs in general — perhaps PCs as well — don’t have such a wide angle of aperture. When I put it at the 40° setting, this means the screen is slightly angled downward. Not fun. But I still think the Air is the way to go though for its lightness. Anyway, you get the picture: align your straight gaze with the top of the computer, and the rest will fall into place.

For a laptop stand, I have the Logitech Notebook Riser. It works great, has three very different angle settings, and was designed with Mac laptops in mind (the one I have in particular for the 15″ laptop, which I currently use on my treadmill desk). Furthermore, I got it for like $25, although it looks like from the lack of online availability that Logitech is moving on to newer models. It is, however, worth noting that my computer stand is not as pretty as some.

The beautiful yet unadjustable Rain Design mStand.

I feel this laptop stand, the Rain Design mStand, succeeds in making ergonomics look seksay (take note, Apple. I would love it if your designs were more ergonomic). But again, for me as a grad student, it was difficult to justify the price of $50, when the cheaper Logitech model also has the benefit of adjustable angles so you know it’ll work for you. Because of the lack of adjustable angles, I advise trying out the mStand before actually buying one yourself.

5. Book stand

In the photo above, the U of A library copy of Vocabulary Development: A Morphological Analysis, part of my current reading docket, is sitting on my kickass Jasmine Book Stand off to the right. When I was in high school, my mom noticed that my neck was always strained as I looked down at books on my desk. So she bought me the entry-level book stand, the Fellowes wire book stand. Here it is in all its $5 glory:

My first book stand. Costs a whole $5 on Amazon.

Now, this wire stand is great for books, but I read a lot of flimsier print content: mostly academic papers, which, until screens get a whole lot more eye-friendly, I refuse to read on a computer. I’ve tried the metal stand with a big, heavy, supportive book behind it, and that sort of works, but let’s be honest, it’s a clumsy hack. The Jasmine on the other hand — just whisper that to yourself too — The Jasmine — is great for any print content. The Jasmine also features an adjustable angle, a key element of any ergonomic equipment. Of course the drawback is its size compared to the wire stand, but for your home or office, i.e. not when traveling, it’s by far the better choice.

The Jasmine: the Cadillac of book stands, my friend.

6. Wait for it… my Leap Chair

The single most important ergonomic investment I have made, other than perhaps the treadmill for the treadmill desk, has been my desk chair for home. As a grad student, when I had severe back pain, I made an appointment with the ergonomic specialists at the University of Minnesota. The what, you ask? Yes, the University of Minnesota has a whole office devoted to ergonomics, but I had no clue about it. Nor did anyone else I talked to, actually. These types of employee services really should be broadcast to the university community at large. How the hell did I find out the ergonomics center at the U of M then? My department administrator, when I was mentioning that I wanted to buy a new ergonomic chair, mentioned that I could have a university discount, and said I should look into it. Mind you, not a word was said about the ergonomics center per se, it just turned out that those were the people I needed to call to get the discount.

Upon looking at their website, I saw that the ergonomics peeps had a showroom of chairs and workstations and made an appointment to check them out. Neil Carlson, a very knowledgeable staff member, met me there; since he was the first ergonomics expert I’d ever met, I promptly subjected him to a long list of questions that I won’t detail here. Probably because I was a grad student, he showed me a couple of low- and mid-level range chairs, you know, that felt better than a normal chair, and were a little more expensive than your typical office chair. On none of them, however, was I like WOW, which frankly was the response I wanted. A lot of those chairs claimed to be ergonomic, but they were really just ergonomic for dudes who are 5’10″. I’m 5’2″ and weigh 110 lbs. Those chairs were not going to cut it. So I said, “What do you think the best chair would be for a petite woman?” Neil then walked over to a banal-looking midsize model and said, “This one. It’s the Leap Chair. It’s a little pricier, but it’s top of the line.” I sat in it, and he adjusted it. One of the most amazing features about the Leap Chair is that everything is adjustable. For example, you can adjust not only the height of the armrests, but also their width. I totally had my WOW moment.

Unfortunately, I also had an opposite wow moment when I saw the price tag — $625. And, I was informed, that was after the special discount people affiliated with the U of M got. However, Neil told me, there was an additional 25% off if the university itself would pay for it. Of course then I tried to have my department pay for it, with me buying it from them after I graduated. This strategy would’ve worked out okay, I think, except for the fact that the main department administrator, the only one with The Knowledge, was actually right then getting transferred to another department. I sent her many emails about this, as before she left she said it would be possible. But alas, she was just so busy having just changed departments and all. I was a little frustrated as I felt like a graduate student shouldn’t have to pay $625, actually more like $700 with taxes and all, to have a decent chair. But I decided that it was enough of a priority for me that I would suck it up.

Fortunately, my mom, a nurse practitioner, has always been supportive of my health. She offered to quasi-price match, which brought my share down significantly. I still tried to haggle with the Leap Chair vendor, but to no success. Finally I acquiesced and bought my Leap Chair, on which I’m sitting as I write this. Over a year later, the Leap Chair is still amazing.

The whole enchilada, including the Leap Chair.

Big-picture ergonomics

Ergonomicizing my home workspace is an ongoing, piecemeal process; there are still plenty of things I’d like to get, and once I do, I have to confront the office situation. And it’s not cheap. If you work at a university, chances are you’ll get something of a discount from your work. Maybe if you work at a company with good employee benefits, you’ll get some of these things for free. But for most people, ergonomicizing your workspace to the degree your body deserves will probably cost you. I would say then to start by doing a cost-benefit analysis, and focus on the areas that cause you the most discomfort. The chair I feel is huge, but if you can’t afford it, start with a book stand, then maybe a laptop stand and external keyboard. All that musculoskeletal stuff is connected via the kinetic chain anyway and any improvement anywhere will likely do you some good.

As a society, we’re just not at the point yet where it is an imperative to provide people with healthy workspaces. I believe this will change though, because some of these modifications are so simple, and because we need them. The only guiding principle with all this ergonomics stuff is, “Person first, machine second”.

One of my favorite books ever, Diffusion of Innovations, actually has a little vignette about the Dvorak keyboard, the keyboard layout that minimizes hand movement and maximizes efficiency. The Dvorak was mentioned to address the question of why an innovation that is objectively superior to its predecessor by any conceived measure wouldn’t catch on. The brief response touched upon the fact that vested interests from manufacturers and even typists made sure that the way they were familiar with doing things is the way shit gets done. Oftentimes though, it’s just through inertia. I myself do not yet use the Dvorak keyboard layout, but it’s a goal of mine in the near future to make the switch. I was able to switch to the AZERTY layout just fine while living in France. Now I just need internal motivation: it suffices to visualize my fingers 40 or 50 years from now, with all the writing, emailing, texting and increasing amount of gchatting I do.

On reading, a joy that has always sustained me

Posted on November 29, 2011 by Paula

The first book I remember having a more than fleeting interaction with was Roald Dahl’s The Witches. I must’ve been about five or six, and my mom and I read it every night before bed. Every night I would beg her to please just read me one more chapter. “Vitches of Inklannndddd!” she would scream in her Grand High Witch voice. I was terrified, but needed to know if the boy protagonist would escape his encounters with all those witches.

Vitches of Inklannnddd!!!

Although my mom read most of the book, I remember there were times where she would let me read a bit. If I could’ve read the entire thing myself, I would’ve, so I wouldn’t have to wait until nighttime until Mom was ready.

Fast-forwarding to reading as an adult, one piece of advice I would give all incoming graduate students is to never stop reading. Read the popular-audience books in your field. Read outside your field. Read fiction. Read the New Yorker. The cross-disiplinary insight you gain will help you come up with original research questions in your field. The recent devaluation of fiction in our society is, in my opinion, not only sad, but worrisome for our innovative edge in domains like technology. The astute fiction-writer will make ingenious observations about human nature, societies, and technological possibilities well before science can empirically test such hypotheses, and before engineers can build such realities.

Several of my professor friends complain about their (native-speaker) grad students’ writing abilities. To be fair, I’m not talking about people in linguistics, as perhaps the field lends itself particularly well to an appreciation for language. Good writing is tricky to pick up, and one of the best ways is to simply read more. Even after years of training in linguistics, sometimes I have difficulty explaining why a particular written formulation doesn’t flow well: it’s an intuitive knowledge I’ve picked up after reading thousands and thousands of hours of both academic and non-academic literature.

As an undergrad, I initially majored in English and French not to be a linguist, but a creative writer. In an interesting twist of fate, the MFA student-instructor I had in my creative writing seminar as a freshman was obsessed with Hemingway and his reportage-style fiction, which I hated. We once spent half an hour analyzing a line from a Hemingway short that went something like this:

She tasted the tea, and set it down.

I can’t remember the name of the story, and I can’t find the quote online anywhere, but I assure you that it was something about a woman tasting something and setting it down on a plate or saucer. We all had copies of my instructor’s personal copy, so we could see that she had underlined set it down. “What does that mean, she set it down?” she asked. The class hesitated until somebody came up with the answer she was looking for. “She doesn’t like it?” somebody hazarded. “Exactly!” the instructor said. “In this one detail about her actions, Hemingway is giving us a clue into her psychological state.” This is total bullshit, I thought. I had to raise my hand: “All I’m really getting from this is that she set down the cup. I don’t know if we can impute more into it than that — I taste things that I like and set them down all the time.” This view was not encouraged from the class; the other students had spent precious minutes of their lives trying to interpret the “right” way of thinking about this setting down of the cup. I needed out.

Still in the English program at the University of Colorado at Boulder, I turned more to the literature side of things and took a class with J.E. Rivers. Rivers turned me on to Nabokov, one of my favorite authors ever, and tolerated my quirkiness, such as writing a critical essay in iambic pentameter and rhyming couplets. He was great, and I don’t think I gave him enough credit for my sticking with English. I sat in my dorm devouring Lolita on a Friday night instead of going out — here was my kind of writing! Hemingway seemed mad at the English language, using the most basic vocabulary with no rhetorical flourish. Nabokov, on the other hand, would romance his prose and make it sing.

In my junior year at the University of Minnesota, I became more interested in linguistics. I felt literary scholarship didn’t focus on language as much as I wanted to. And, it was not scientific enough. I remember a literature discussion section in which we offered our interpretations of the works we were reading. One student came up with interpretation X, and the TA, perhaps desperate for us to contribute, said, “That’s good.” Then another student said that she felt it was the exact opposite of X. “That’s good,” responded the TA again. No, no, no! I thought. This cannot be possible. Both X and the opposite of X cannot be good! At least not the same degree of good! But still, I kept my undergraduate majors of English and French so as to graduate on time.

From that point on, I have never needed to read anything other than works in my field. And although I know academics’ schedules are tight, I’m still amazed at the number of those — without kids, mind you — that don’t read outside their field at all.

Having moved to a new country and started a new job four months ago, I’ve had little time for anything but work and figuring out my new surroundings. For the first month, I would fall asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. Doing nothing but work was making me grumpy, and the situation had to change. Since moving to Edmonton, I’ve not slept much, but I have now managed to read You are not a gadget by Jaron Lanier; The Heart and the fist by Eric Greitens; Rafa, the Rafael Nadal autobiography; Life, on the line by Grant Achatz and Nick Kokonas; and currently I’m two-thirds into Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. It seems I’ve been on an (auto-)biographical kick of people I find inspiring.

I once read somewhere, although I’ll never be able to find it again, that we read the majority of books that “change our lives” before age 22, or some similarly young age. While this is probably true for me too, I still find a lot of gems out there. Here are just a few of the works outside my field that have deeply impressed me, in rough chronological order of my reading. Please note that these aren’t recommendations per se, as the subject matter of at least the first two aren’t for everyone:

Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov. Lolita is pretty well known, so I won’t belabor the point. It’s a great story, written from the unapologetic perspective of a wry middle-aged European professor transplanted to America. You know it’s good when you find yourself cheering at atrocious turns of events despite yourself. Example: when Charlotte Haze finds out about Humbert’s love for her young daughter but then is immediately killed by a car while running across the street. It’s terrible, right? But Charlotte was just getting in the way of Humbert’s relationship with Lolita. F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Good literature should challenge your intelligence.
Love in a dead language, by Lee Siegel. I saw this book on the shelf when I was working for an independent bookstore. The cover and, as you can imagine, the title, intrigued me.
Let the rollercoaster begin: my favorite work of Lee Siegel's.

This novel has a ton going on in it. First there’s the not-so-subtle Lolita spoof. Second, it’s written on several different levels. An Indologist prof (which, by the way, author Siegel happens to be) plans a field trip to India to seduce the only student he’s taking with him, Lalita Gupta. The main text is his diary/translation of the Kamasutra. But he mysteriously dies before the project can be published, and his frustrated grad student is left to edit the text, which he does with footnotes and multi-media examples, such as an example paper of Lalita’s (all academics can relate). Those who find it over-the-top don’t get it: that’s the point. This book was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, but was too far out there to win.
The Importance of being Ernest, by Oscar Wilde. This work is also well known, so I’ll just say that in reading it, I saw that conversation could be an art form, not just a means of communication. That was a fun revelation to have, and it fostered my interest in language and hence linguistics.
Mémoires d’Hadrien (Memoirs of Hadrian). As a French major in the U.S., you normally read The Canon of French literature, and for some reason Marguerite Yourcenar’s works often aren’t included. I would say they’re a little complicated for the sheltered U.S. foreign-language university classes, but we read plenty of Racine and Molière, and 300-350 years passing can really complicate a text. So I moved to France without knowing too many French authors I liked. I asked a friend of my roommate’s, a professor of English literature in Dijon, who to read, given that I liked Nabokov, D. H. Lawrence, Siegel, etc. He suggested Marguerite Yourcenar, and particularly Mémoires. I was a bit skeptical at first, since a pseudo-autobiography of a Roman emperor didn’t sound too appealing. But it was very well written, taking the form of a letter in which Hadrian retraces his life as he’s close to death. It’s quite moving, and I’m told the English translation is well done. After this, I went on to read many other Yourcenar books: they’re all good.
Diffusion of innovations, by Everett Rogers. This non-fiction book discusses the diffusion of several types of innovations across many different societies. I cannot proselytize enough about this book, especially to sociolinguists. The modest uptake in citations to this book from linguists has only happened recently, despite the first edition coming out in 1962. As of November 29, 2011, this book has 38,418 citations on Google Scholar. Why? It’s relevant to almost every field in social sciences, and it’s extremely well written, including a great organization scheme and index. Even if you’re not in academia, this book would still be fun to read.

A couple of years ago, I got the opportunity to babysit a cousin of mine, who was five at the time, on a weekly basis. Samuel has an excellent imagination, and loves books. Of course I immediately thought we could read The Witches together. I imagined reading it in the same tone my mom read to me in: “Vitches of Inklannndddd!!!” I started the book, and Samuel was spellbound. But soon it became apparent that he wasn’t scared and loving it, he was just scared. We didn’t even make it to the Grand High Witch. He was fine with dragons in his closet, and an entire people he’s invented named the Gee-Gees, but hearing about witches was too much. “Let’s not read that anymore Paula,” Samuel said. I really wanted to read it, so I made sure to tell him it was make-believe. But that didn’t assuage his fears any, and I didn’t want to traumatize him, so I gave it up. With my own kids though, I just don’t know what I would do if they didn’t want to read The Witches. I have few dreams about being a parent, but that is one of them.

My dream of having a treadmill desk has finally become a reality

Posted on October 28, 2011 by Paula

A couple of years ago, I suffered a painful upper back and neck injury that I only half know the etiology of. Maybe I’ll write more about that later, but one of the upshots of the whole experience is that I have become a big proponent of ergonomics, and of being kind to my body more generally. As with all desk jobs, being in academia entails large amounts of time spent in front of a computer. Most people do this seated, not for any principled reason, but mostly because that’s how office work has always been done. In fact, when you find out more about ergonomics, you’ll find out that’s primarily the reason why we have terrible office habits — tradition. Why would it cost more to produce a vertical mouse than a horizontal mouse, if mass production didn’t enter into play? But I’m getting ahead of myself here. This first post of mine about ergonomics focuses on my treadmill desk.

My treadmill-desk-dream, side-ish shot.

I found out about the idea of treadmill desks by googling/YouTubing some keywords like “ergonomic workstations” and riding the related video waves. I came across a video which featured Mayo Clinic researcher James Levine talking about his treadmill desk as a solution to obesity. My ears perked up. I swear I can’t lose weight no matter how much exercise I do (case in point: training for a marathon) and while weight loss isn’t a big concern of mine, additional exercise never hurts, especially during the Edmonton winter. Mainly, I was interested in the treadmill desk for my sore back. Here’s the video I saw:

Some people say that for sore backs, all you need is a standing desk, and not a treadmill desk. I don’t know about you, but my body starts to get achy and/or fidgety if I just stand in one place. These problems would be eliminated, I felt, in keeping moving. It makes sense, right? In walking slowly, the joints and muscles keep moving, but aren’t stressed.

As a caveat, I should add right here that when I went to the ergonomics specialist at the University of Minnesota and asked him about treadmill desks, he would not endorse the concept. He said he felt there wasn’t enough research out there showing that the benefits outweigh the costs, which are mostly potential injury if you fall off or forget you’re on a treadmill. Fair enough. If you’re uncoordinated or absentminded, maybe the treadmill desk is not for you. But I plowed straight ahead with the dream, because I am coordinated enough to walk at 1.0 – 1.5 mph (1.6 – 2.4 km/hr) and chew gum at the same time.

Unfortunately, while I was a grad student at Minnesota, that’s all the treadmill desk was for me: a dream. Graduate students generally have very little say in their physical work environment: I for one technically shared my office with like 10 other students, and there was no room for a treadmill. There’s no reason why grad students shouldn’t have access to say a department treadmill desk though. Could I have installed a treadmill desk at home instead, you ask? Well, only if I wanted to get rid of a couch, table, or bookshelf, the lack of any of which would have made my living room far less hospitable. Graduate students also tend to have small living spaces. And besides, I was going to move in a year.

Enter Alberta. As soon as I found out about my new position as a visiting professor at the University of Alberta, one of the first thoughts I had was, “I’ll finally be able to have a treadmill desk!” But not an expensive one though, as some of the treadmill desk workstations can cost upwards of $4,000. Here then is what I figured I needed for a DIY version (and what you’ll need too if you plan on making a treadmill desk):

A treadmill,
A way to transport the treadmill to my office,
A friend who’s handy who could actually make the desk part of the treadmill desk (please suspend your disbelief. I’m not a freeloader but I’m definitely not handy either).

I estimated that all these together could cost up to $600. I was lucky: my treadmill desk ended up costing only about $150. Re (1), I knew that a colleague of mine, Harald Baayen, was leaving Edmonton for Tuebingen, Germany just before I arrived. I also knew that Harald had a treadmill at home. Treadmills are bulky — I wouldn’t want to take one to Germany — so I asked him if I could buy it from him. He said yes, and asked for $150. That is a great price, but also, it was a pretty simple model. But the beauty of walking at 1.0 mph is that you don’t need a fancy model.

Harald was leaving Edmonton literally two days before I arrived, so (2) had to be taken care of before I got there. Harald and another excellent colleague of mine up here, Pat Bolger, were also kind enough to transport the treadmill from Harald’s home to my office while returning some of Harald’s home computer equipment to the U of A. I had asked a friend up here if he could do it, and I was willing to pay him $75, but well he said he wouldn’t accept any cash, and in the end he didn’t even need to do it. And my colleagues would not accept remuneration, and so I work hard and figure that counts for a lot.

The last thing I needed was (3), a handy friend or family member who could make the desk part of the treadmill for me. You’re probably wondering why I couldn’t just make the desk myself. The answer is, I am horrible at handy-man-type projects. And sadly, I have no desire to be better. And for this particular project, which involved a saw, well, I’ve had a mild phobia of sharp objects after cutting my finger pretty badly on a blender a couple of years ago. I’ve forced myself to use things like knives, as well as the perpetrating blender which I have not replaced due to graduate-student poverty, but any other sharp objects that are electrically powered, I’d rather steer clear of.

Fortunately, a friend from Minnesota, Chad Marsolek, was handy and must’ve gotten sick of hearing me talk about the Holy Grail of workplace ergonomics. In fact, he had volunteered to make the desk part well before I even knew where I’d be working in the fall. Before I left for Edmonton, Chad gave me the formica-ish plank and the styrofoam-like support-thingey that goes between the treadmill handles and the plank. Do you see how my vocabulary just plummets when I even talk about all things handy? Me and “handy” are like oil and water. Anyway, again, I was willing to pay someone about $100 for making the desk part of the treadmill desk, but Chad just asked for something ridiculous like a six-pack of Bell’s, which I gladly provided.

Walking at 1.5 mph/2.4 km/hr while answering emails.

As a measure of my near-zero HQ (handiness quotient), I literally did not even know what a shim was until somebody suggested I get some to stabilize the plank on the arms of the treadmill. With the shims now, the plank is very solid and I have no qualms putting a mug of tea next to my computer. If you’re tall, you can use another piece of foam to prop the board on. There are several videos and instructions out there on how to make a treadmill desk, and I think Chad followed this advice: http://www.treadmill-desk.com/2007/12/49-treadmill-desk.html. Yes, there’s a dude out there with an entire blog devoted to the treadmill desk. Actually it’s kinda cool to see how much he’s walked and all; he’s clearly very into the whole thing: http://www.treadmill-desk.com/2007/07/walking-across-america.html. There are some other designs that are more permanent, and perhaps more sturdy. But I like that I can take the plank off if I want to do some more vigorous walking.

A close-up of the board, the foam-y thingey, and the shims from one side. It's quite stable.

One more thing you will need is tact and consideration when dealing with your colleagues or other building inhabitants, if you put your treadmill in your office. Treadmill desks are new, and sometimes it’s tough to be an innovator. Especially in my position: my job here isn’t permanent, and the last thing I want to do is be high-maintenance. But bringing a treadmill desk into my office within the first month of working was, as I discovered, a question mark for the department administrator, who rightly wondered if it would be interfering with anyone’s work experience. So I went downstairs to the philosophy department and asked an administrative assistant to help me simulate the noise the people in the office below me would hear as I, not exactly a big person, walked on my treadmill at 1.7 km/hr. She stayed in the office, and I went upstairs and did my thang. When I came back down, she said she couldn’t even hear me, and besides, the students who used that office weren’t always there. Green light!

I average 4 – 8 miles (6 – 12 km) per week on my treadmill desk. If I’m just doing something like responding to email, I ramp up the speed to 1.5 mph. If I’m doing something more cognitively demanding, I have to slow it down to 1.1 mph. And if a task requires a lot of concentration, I’m still not able to do it on the treadmill. For example, if I’m preparing slides for my undergraduate class, I’ll do the initial conceptualization of the lecture seated. Then for the implementation, I get right on the treadmill desk. I usually walk in 1-2 hour spurts; after 2 hours I want a break. And unlike some people, I have special slip-on shoes for walking. There’s no point in adding wear and tear to good shoes when it takes 15 seconds to slip into my old Puma Mary Janes.

If you have the means, I highly recommend getting a treadmill desk. As my experience shows, with the help of friends and colleagues a treadmill desk doesn’t need to cost an arm and a leg. And treadmill desks are less obtrusive than you’d think. They provide clear weight-loss benefits, and also help to get your muscles and joints moving. An additional benefit is that the more I use my treadmill desk, the less I feel sluggish during the day. Ugh, I have a huge postprandial dip where it’s all I can do to keep from napping under my desk. My fix is usually a piece of chocolate. Not necessary when I’m using my treadmill desk!

Some of my other ergonomic fetishes have been met with laughter, scorn, and/or curiosity. Like my wheelie backpack phase — oh, people just loooved to make fun of me for my wheelie. At Alberta though, my colleague Ben Tucker already has a standing desk, so people just view the treadmill desk as the next iteration of office ergonomics and are generally positive about the whole thing. If they stop in unexpectedly and I’m on the treadmill, I’ll stop, but they say, “No no, keep walking.” I don’t have many undergrad students visit, but those who do take notice. The treadmill desk sets a great workplace example for them. Prior to my back problems, I’d never thought of setting an example of the physical aspects of how to work. But the workweek isn’t getting any shorter, and computer use is on the rise. I hope that with the treadmill desk (and all my other ergonomic stuff) I can be a model of how best to engage your mind while not forgetting about your body.

Could baby talk be “in”?

Posted on October 4, 2011 by Paula

For the sake of science, I’m just gonna throw this out there: I frequently talk baby talk with my close friends and family. Lots of them do it too, and there’s no baby, pet, or significant other around. This is a use of baby talk that’s been studied very little. More on that later, but first, why do I speak in this horribly affected and annoying way, you wonder? The short response is, I actually think it’s fun, and the people I’m talking to do it too.

I used to think baby talk was just an anomaly of my sister, one of her friends, myself, and a certain Arizona linguist. The sister group and the linguist group had no overlap, but still, small N. Lately though I’ve been hearing it more, and seeing it frequently on my sisters’ Facebook page (as well as on several of her friends’). We’ve even got multiple boys doing it now, and in public places. People are writing it. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I give you Exhibit A. Which does not, by the way, include my sister or me.

Exhibit A: Wook at aww the baby talk.

Exhibit A gives excellent examples of various features of baby talk. Baby talk by adolescents or adults is meant to imitate infant baby talk, of which I’ll give a quick-and-dirty non-exhaustive list of features, with corresponding examples from Exhibit A:

Gliding, changing “l” and “r” to “w” mostly but also “y” sounds (“good wuck“). When it’s an “l” becoming a “w”, it’s called L-vocalization,
Stopping, changing fricative sounds like the “th” in “thinking” to “t” (“there you go tinkin“),
Fronting, moving the place of articulation forward in the vocal tract (“hang out wiff us”),
Syllable simplification, like expanding a syllable with a coda to two coda-less syllables (so bed becomes beddy). Simplifying somewhat, a syllable coda is the set of consonants after the vowel in a syllable,
Lack of function words, like the lack of was in “Cuwz I never invited”.

Like infant baby talk, there’s substantial variation in adults’ imitative baby talk.

It’s kind of hard to try to search for works on baby talk that’s not, well, directed at babies, but the Wikipedia article on baby talk lists the following non-child-directed uses:

patronizing or derogatory baby talk. This use of baby talk is intended to make the listener feel like a baby,
flirtatious baby talk, baby talk in romantic relationships,
baby talk with pets. I’m guilty of this use too.

The article also lists “foreigner talk”, i.e. the simplifications people make when talking to a non-native speaker. But that totally lacks the affective component that is crucial to the other uses of baby talk, so I don’t think it should be included. A brief search on Google Scholar reveals that there’s another type of non-child-directed baby talk:

baby talk to the elderly.

I was thinking that again, this was simple utterance simplification, lacking the affective component I find crucial in baby talk, but apparently intonation in baby talk to the elderly is indistinguishable from that used with two-year-olds. Ouch. I personally would find that patronizing, but apparently it could be of use. Read the paper.

This updated classification is only lacking one thing: baby talk amongst friends, not necessarily romantic partners. So, here’s a revised classification of types of non-child-directed baby talk:

deliberately patronizing or derogatory baby talk,
baby talk amongst close social ties, including romantic partners,
pet-directed baby talk,
elderly-directed baby talk.

Now, the only paper I saw specifically addressing (2) in the context of not just romantic relationships, but to all close relationships, is right here (Bombar and Wittig 1996). The findings are kind of awesome (although I do take issue with some of the methods). First, it says that 68.3% of survey respondents had used baby talk in their current or most recent romantic relationship. Maybe no surprise. But — hang on to your hats — 50.4% of respondents had used baby talk with their friends! Now, both of these numbers are perhaps inflated from a truly representative sample since they excluded participants who didn’t follow directions or had not been in a romantic relationship since the age of 17. Since these authors view baby talk as a type of social bonding, you can imagine that maybe those who haven’t been in a relationship for longer periods would be less likely to use baby talk. But I doubt these figures are too inflated. In other words, lots of people talk baby to their friends.

A deeper look into the findings though reveals that in fact though, it’s not that common. That is, not nearly as common as my sister and her friends. The paper doesn’t have information about the frequency of baby talk to friends, but it does have some info on frequency among romantic partners: between one-third and one-half of the times partners had contact with each other, they used baby talk. But usually, that use was just an utterance, if that. I’m guessing it’s much lower for non-partners. The baby talk I’m talking about can span entire subject matters, as you can see with Exhibit A.

Regardless of its frequency, these findings mean baby talk can function as an in-group phenomenon, similar in scope of group to inside jokes. But language nerds, there’s reason to flag this behavior as a potential trend. First, most of the people who I know who use baby talk are the classic innovators or early adopters. As I mentioned a bit ago, adolescent girls are in the vanguard for language change, and lots of my baby talkers are adolescent girls. Second, all change initially sounds affected, and no one can argue that baby talk doesn’t sound affected. Third, amongst the baby talkers I’ve seen, it’s still heavily an in-group phenomenon, but unlike the participants in the Bombar and Littig study, they’re not afraid to baby talk around — but not to — people who they’re not close.

Realistically then, what am I suggesting the fate of baby talk will be? It’s heavily stigmatized in mainstream culture, so it’s difficult to imagine it becoming a full-fledged change. That is, I doubt we’ll be the next Poland, where l-vocalization of /ɫ/ (the coda “l” in English, like in fall but not in laugh) is a done deal. So in Poland, the city Łódź is said like the first syllable of wouldja, as in, “Wouldja mind giving me a hand?”

The only thing that I really feel comfortable about saying about the future baby talk is that it could gain in prominence as an in-group phenomenon. But the in-group might still be pretty small. Still, it seems to fill the apparent need to differentiate between friends and “cwose” friends. As an added bonus, baby talk is available in not just speech, but also in witing.

If you or anyone you know uses baby talk, or if you’ve seen it around, please let me know about it. Like I said, I’m curious to see if it’s a trend.

Adding to and editing Wikipedia in the classroom, I

Posted on September 26, 2011 by Paula

This semester, my Ling 102 students are editing Wikipedia articles on topics relevant to class, and I’m making the materials available if others want to do something similar. All the materials currently available for the project are here, in zipped form. If you’re looking for a description of how the project works, read on.

Ling 102 is the second semester in a year-long introductory sequence for undergraduates, so they’re not exactly experts on language, but I know they will rise to the occasion. You set your goals low, and students will meet them (more or less). You set them high, and they’ll meet them to the same degree. My first job out of undergrad was instructing high-school Latin. I suggested we perform Auricula Meretricula, a play entirely in Latin that we did in my first-year college Latin course, at the end-of-the-year talent show. The pimp (the male lead, the play’s about a prostitute but is entirely PG) had what I was told was mild autism. But he wanted so badly to take part in the talent show. We practiced before, during, and after school, and the night of the play those kids were awesome. My point is that I have no doubts about turning undergrads loose on Wikipedia. That is, given the highly structured, semester-long nature of the project described below.

First I should credit the Association for Psychological Science with sowing the seeds in my mind: this year the APS launched an initiative to improve all the psychology-related articles on Wikipedia. This link has a great summary of the benefits for students who work on this type of project, including writing for a general audience. I haven’t contributed much to the APS forum on this, but I plan to at some point. Some students are working on articles relevant to psycholinguistics like the mental lexicon (which, believe it or not, doesn’t even have a Wikipedia article as of this post).

First, before the semester began, I identified 10 or so articles that were relevant to course material, that needed improvement (or simply creation), and that were accessible for undergrads. Here they are, with links to the Wikipedia articles or sections of articles students will be editing (when available):

Cree, Dene Suline, or other Aboriginal language. The students will first pick a language, and then a specific topic to work on, like syntax;
Quebec Sign Language, the sign language unique to Canada with the largest number of speakers;
Dialectal differences in ASL (e.g. Canadian vs. American or other distinctions);
Vocabulary unique to Canadian English;
Vocabulary unique to Quebec French;
Word formation;
Lexical borrowings/loanwords;
Blends;
The language of hip-hop;
Linguistic hedges;
The mental lexicon;
Other (students’ choice).

Looking at these articles, you can see that some are pretty cursory, and others lack organization and/or correct information. You can also see that many of the choices relate to languages spoken in Canada. A major focus of the class is language in its social context, and I’m at the University of Alberta, so this makes sense. Of these possibilities, students have chosen to work on an Aboriginal language (as of last week, they didn’t know which one), lexical borrowings, blends, and the mental lexicon. Stay tuned for some excellent articles.

The students are working in groups, and I felt that one way to reduce any group-related issues relating to unequal distributions of labor was to make students as enthusiastic about their topic as possible. So, instead of assigning groups, I asked them to give me their first, second, and third choices for topics and any group member choices they had; I then created groups based on these preferences. This may have been a bit more work, but in the end all but two students got to work on his or her first or second topic preferences. Also, I’m having group members evaluate each others’ work, so students can learn how to be accountable to their peers. The current evaluations for group members students will be filling out is pretty much copied verbatim from Mark Hoven Stohs’ form. Leave it to a b-school prof to be on the ball with group work.

As I mentioned, the project is highly structured. Throughout the semester, there are several firm deadlines for various stages of the work. I’ve told them the project is cumulative, and if they miss one deadline, they’ll just get further behind for the next ones. The handout describing this project, including these deadlines, is long and detailed. Like, I tell them they have to try their best to interview at least one expert on the topic, and then I give them a template of the form the email should take and tell them to copy and paste it for their email, even though I will probably end up emailing the expert beforehand just to establish a contact. In the end, though, I know they’ll appreciate my attention to detail.

We then spent two 50-minute classes editing the Wikipedia article on Quebec French, one of the topics above that students aren’t working on. This article was a train wreck, mostly from an organizational standpoint. At first glimpse though it seemed deceptively fine, and here’s why: how many times have you ever read a Wikipedia article from beginning to end? Me, for example, if the article has a table of contents, I can’t remember a time when I have. I skim until I find what I’m looking for or where it would be. That’s the thing with having a ton of editors working separately: it’s not like the information is faulty, and it’s kind of informative. But you could clearly see that several people had worked disjointly on this page.

We mostly focused on the vocabulary of Quebec French, which means we spent most of our time in section 4.4, “Lexis”. This section was flagged for needing expansion. The page as a whole is still kind of a train wreck, like why did the people editing section 3 think they should put their references in that section as opposed to at the end of the entire article, where all the other references are? In the end, who knows, and it’s not our job to wonder why. The point is, the article is less of a train wreck after our edits. I told them, by the way, that if they ran across such issues outside the scope of their project, they could but do not have to correct them. It’s good to get used to imperfection, and the guiding principle I have told them is to leave the page in a better state than when they started working on it.

For our section, we mostly worked on improving organization and adding content, which was also organizational in that it added a linguistic classification of how vocabulary in Quebecois is different from vocabulary in other varieties of French. We added all the information in section 4.4.1 up until section 4.4.1.1. That Poirier reference? Ours! In the process, we got rid of a bunch of rather disorganized itemized lists with examples and put in the tables you see now. Even work on that small part isn’t perfect — we pulled section 4.4.1.3 up from the now-extinct section 5.5, but it was mostly redundant with the independent article on the Quebec French lexicon. So we suggested it be merged into that article, and maybe I can do that over Canadian Thanksgiving, who knows. But it brings up a good question, namely what material is good for the broader “Language X” page, and what info belongs in the more specific “Lexicon of Language X” page? Our guiding principle was, more general information on the language page, and more specific stuff on the lexicon page. And we didn’t repeat the info we added in the lexicon page — should we have? We figured maybe not, since we did put the link up to the lexicon page for people to see as well. All our changes, along with Wikipedia code, are available in the zip file of materials for this project.

Next comes the issue of plagiarism and copyright. Students don’t know how to deal with these issues, and who can blame them? Academics get in trouble for these issues all the time. So, I gave them the following guidelines:

Don’t use direct quotes. For the purposes of our work, they’re not necessary. Use of the same technical term or concept doesn’t constitute a direct quote, but wholesale copying of phrases or sentences does.
When in doubt, cite a work. Give credit where credit is due; in linguistics theories, concepts, results, and even example words and sentences should be cited.
As a general rule, do not discuss over 10% of the material in an article or book. For the most part this won’t be a problem anyway because of the 250-500 word limit students have for their edits.
One thing that I added after an astute student talked about copying pictures of ASL signs was, no adding of pictures from a source onto Wikipedia. Those are copyrighted materials, and we are adding to the public domain. A tentative solution we’ve arrived at is for students in their group to take a picture of one of them doing the sign in question — thereby also immortalizing them with Wikipedia fame! Of course, they have to cite the source of the original image.

So far, that’s all we’ve done, but I will keep you posted on progress we make on this project. If you have any comments, I (we) would love to hear them.

The language of adolescence, as seen through MTV’s Awkward

Posted on September 18, 2011 by Paula

[Disclaimer: toward the end of this post there are some sexual references. Such is the life of one who documents slang.]

My sisters and a friend of theirs, knowing that I’m interested in new words and slang, recently suggested I watch MTV’s Awkward, a new TV show about — what else with such a title — life and angst in high school. Awkward got a generally positive review from the New York Times, and it seems to be the only MTV show that actually employs writers these days. I came for the slang, and stayed for the show. There have been multiple moments where I, while frantically taking notes, have had to push my computer back suddenly for fear of spitting out my drink onto it while laughing uncontrollably. So far, no major incidents, thank god.

Jenna Hamilton, the main character of Awkward, is ready to high five anyone.

My sisters are 23, 19, and 18 (I also have a brother, 20, but dudes figure less prominently in Awkward, and in the construction of awkwardness in general), so they’re in the perfect demographic to talk about awkwardness. High school constituted terrible social hazing and the construction of rigid norms in my day, and it’s not getting any better. In fact, I wonder if it’s getting worse (I do believe awkwardness is more of an issue for today’s teenagers, but explaining why merits an entirely different post). Their generation has taken the word awkward, and its corresponding concept, to new heights. One of my sisters and her friends say awksauce, a shortening of awkward combined with -sauce, one of my favorite new-ish suffixes that attaches to adjectives. To date, I’ve heard -sauce with three adjectives most frequently: lamesauce, awesomesauce, and awksauce, the three adjectives teenagers these days need the most.

Furthermore, I once received a text from one of my sisters: “Text me. I’m awkward.” Given the circumstances, she clearly meant it in an impermanent sense (the type of adjective that would use the verb estar in Spanish), while awkward is typically an adjective of the more permanent variety (and would correspondingly take the verb ser in Spanish). For me, you are either awkward or not, it’s not like Friday night you were awkward. My sister’s use of awkward in the temporary sense, perhaps a shortening of “I’m feeling awkward”, is new. And as any linguist who’s studied the lexicon (ahem!), will tell you, higher rates of polysemy — multiple meanings of a word — are positively correlated with a word’s frequency. And amidst the high school crowd, awkward is way more frequent today than it was 10 years ago.

All this is to say that the show’s title perfectly captures the zeitgeist of the times. Awkward gets funnier, and more slang seems to be used, after the first episode, which I suppose is how people work too. The overall plot of the show is that the main character Jenna, and her best friend Tamara, want to be cool without losing their own identities. Jenna likes Matty, a popular boy who she lost her virginity to, and who likes her back but is afraid to commit — to dating a nerd. Meanwhile, Sadie, an overweight cheerleader whose parents bought her popularity (fat girls can’t be popular on their own, as we’re reminded at several points), also likes Matty and has a death wish for Jenna. Jake, Matty’s friend, is also interested in Jenna but has a virgin-sworn girlfriend Lissa (who is Sadie’s friend, if you can call their relationship a friendship). As you can see, it gets sordid real quick. Two female adults, Jenna’s mom Lacey and her high-school counselor Valerie, also feature prominently, and both are cheerfully flaky, adding good comedic value.

Jenna and Tamara also have a stereotypical over-achieving Asian-American friend named Ming. She sort of gives Jenna advice when Tamara’s not available, but is probably just around for the (pseudo-) diversity quotient. It’s worth noting that every other main character is white, and the show deals largely with white-based ideals. Plus, all this takes place in the town of Palos Verdes. This is, I’m sure, referring to Palos Verdes Estates, an uber-posh California town where, according to Wikipedia, 77% of the population is white, 17% is Asian, and 0.2% is black (fully 21 people). I’ll talk more about this later, but basically the lack of diversity in the show reflects lack of diversity in the town, so you can’t fault MTV for it.

Anywayyy, that lil intro is relevant for the rest of this post, namely how the main characters use language. I’ll mostly focus on use of slang instead of sociophonetics, the different quality of vowels and consonants across social groups, because (a) I’m an expert on vocabulary, not on sound, and (b) any scripted TV show aims for verisimilitude, not actual reality. As part of this aesthetic, the Awkward characters articulate way more than their real-life counterparts would, so any possible sociophonetic effects might be muted. Slang, on the other hand, the Awkward writers go out of their way to include.

Matty and Jake are the only significant male characters on the show, and other than a couple of slang words like handy (“hand job”) and the subsequently coined “sandy” (hand job that feels like sandpaper due to the amount of self-induced sexual pleasure Jake, with his girlfriend’s abstinence promise, must partake in), their language is — sorry bros — pretty unremarkable compared to the girls’. Which, if you believe all the research on language change and sex-based differences relating to language, is kind of an accurate portrayal of reality. I’m not saying it’s not interesting, just that it’s not as varied is all.

Jake and Matty working for the Knickknackers.

Jake (l) tells Matty (r) he kissed Jenna.

This is because adolescent girls are typically in the vanguard of a change in language, such as the use of new slang, a different pronunciation of a vowel or consonant, or the quotative marker be like (on which Mary Bucholtz has some nice work, chapter 5). But all work seems to indicate that those really driving most changes are of a lower socio-economic status than the Awkward girls, who live in a city whose real-life equivalent, Palos Verdes, has a median income of $123,534. In other words, girls like the Awkward characters are in the back of the front of the pack.

Income isn’t everything, however: like any real high school, there’s definitely linguistic variation happening at Palos Verdes. Social position, personality, and identity also matter. Research shows that structurally marginalized groups, such as the “burnouts” in Penny Eckert’s study of Belten High, also use more innovative language forms than successful students — Eckert’s “jocks” and Bucholtz’s “nerds”. Also, social bridges, i.e. people who straddle the fence between multiple social groups, as opposed to strongly affiliating with one, will tend to use newer language forms such as new slang (in linguistics, some prime references for this are Milroy and Milroy 1985, Milroy and Milroy 1992, and Labov 2001, but it’s similar to seminal work done in the 1950s – 1970s in sociology by Everett Rogers and Mark Granovetter on the diffusion of innovations in societies and the strength of weak social ties, respectively). One reason for this is that the bridges get input from a larger number of people and are therefore more likely to transfer new forms across groups, thereby being perceived as a “linguistic leader”, to use Labov’s term, by at least some people they hang out with.

How does this all play out in Awkward? One stark contrast is between Ming and all other female characters. In concert with Bucholtz’s observations about nerds, Ming, as the nerdiest of all the girl characters, hardly uses any slang. But, unlike the title of an earlier paper by Bucholtz (“The Whiteness of Nerds“) would suggest, Ming isn’t white. She’s certainly white-washed, but an integral part of her identity, whether she likes it or not, is having, in her words, a “Tiger Mom“. Perhaps her overly correct language is for Ming a result of having parents who force her to succeed at school — to the extent of putting their dog’s shock collar on her so she’ll finish her homework and extracurricular activities.

Tamara, Ming, and Jenna (from left) at the bonfire, before Ming's mom arrives and demands that she go home.

Bitchy Sadie (whose character, by the way, is hilarious) doesn’t use as much slang as Jenna or Tamara, but more than Ming. In episode 2, for example, Sadie says brils (brilliant) and jacked-up (messed up). This too conforms with linguistic and sociological research. Sadie, as a popular girl (in Eckert’s categorization, she is a “jock”, in Bucholtz’s, she’s a “preppy”), seeks a tightly-knit social network, with no influence from outsiders, linguistic or otherwise. She’s pretty conservative and cares a lot about what people think of her. Verbally, this translates into not wanting to take a chance, as use of slang that’s too new — and thus too socially marked — could affiliate her with social groups other than her own.

Sadie does have a verbal trademark though: she insults someone and then says “You’re welcome” in a sing-songy tone, as in, “You should be thankful I’m telling you that you’re an idiot.” There’s a hilarious little montage of this in episode 6 (“Queen Bee-atches”), an example of which is: “If you just admit your parents are cousins, people will stop making fun of your learning disability… You’re welcome!“

Sadie (r) insults Jenna before dumping that iced mocha onto Jenna's shirt.

By far the biggest users of slang and new vocabulary, though, are Jenna and Tamara, and I’m not just saying this because they get the most air time. In fact, in my episode notes, Tamara uses the same amount of slang as Jenna despite having significantly fewer lines. The voice of Jenna shines through best in her narration and when writing her blog, as she’s much more clever in her own mind than when interacting with others. Correspondingly, these are times when Jenna employs slang the most.

Some of the slang on Awkward is so new, my sisters say, they don’t even understand it. Me neither. Some of the words and expressions are coined, as far as I can tell, expressly for the show. Jenna, for example, in episode 3, uses “take it up the Kardashian” (link to an actual Tumblr blog of Jenna’s entries, written verbatim!). As of September 18, 2011, there are a total of 35 Google hits for this expression, all related to the use on Awkward. Whatever does it mean, you might ask? I didn’t know, not being one to follow celebrity gossip. But here’s the context it was used in: Jake had told Jenna about how Lissa — remember, the virgin gf — told him he could have her be-hymen in lieu of vaginal intercourse, because that way she apparently wouldn’t break her promise. Here’s the context, taken again from Jenna’s blog:

“At least I had a friend in Jake. And when he was telling me about his own intimacy issues with Lissa, I knew exactly what he meant. Not that I wanted to take it up the Kardashian, but maybe Matty and I shouldn’t have done anything until we knew each other better.”

I sort of had an idea about what it meant at that point, but I wanted to find out for sure, being a scientist and all. This led, as you can imagine, to the type of googling that I just hate to do while logged into Gmail — especially through my University of Alberta account, which of course I only realized after it was too late. Let’s be perfectly explicit here, if only because I know there are people out there like me who wouldn’t get it if we weren’t. The expression refers to the Kim Kardashian sex tape, in which there is said to be anal sex. Maybe there is, but I didn’t want to go to sites like pornhub.com to find out. Anyway, my point here is that you have to be pretty savvy to get some of Awkward‘s references. And if you’re not, like me, then by the time you do do the follow-up work to get it, it’s just not funny anymore.

But Awkward‘s pièce de résistance, linguistically speaking, is Tamara. Which, as she tells people at a party, is “spelled TAM-ara, but pronounced Tah-MA-ra, like if your birth control fails, you better Plan B it… TAH-MA-RA!” Tamara is a hot mess of linguistic prowess, including slang. She wants so hard to fit in, and to get as many red cup pics with the popular kids as possible. It’s pretty obvious how much she’s trying, and her use of cutting-edge vocabulary seems to be a part of this. It honestly would make her a little annoying, if she weren’t so over-the-top hilarious about it. When in episode 3 she and Jenna show up at Lissa’s small kick-back of a party and everyone stares at them, Tamara says subtly to Jenna, “Tia… this is awkward.” I didn’t even catch that it’s an acronym until the second time I watched it, but there those kids go again, making new wordforms based off of awkward. Tamara also calls a penis a marshmallow shooter, I think in episode 8. This was one of the times I had to push the computer away from me while sipping tea. Tamara’s language use cracks me up.

Given the social positions of Jenna and Tamara, research in sociolinguistics and sociology suggests that they would be the most likely characters to use slang. And that is indeed what happens. Jenna, for one, straddles a couple of social groups, and Tamara desperately wants to. In this sense, they have very open social networks, which are associated with greater use of innovative forms of language such as new slang.

Throughout Awkward, language becomes a focal point relatively often. In episode 8, for example, Jenna’s mom and her friend Ally decide to throw a party, at which point they go on Jenna’s pseudo-Facebook page and update her status to that effect. The following dialogue ensues:

Jenna: “Mom! Are you logged into my homepage?”

Mom: “Mmm hmm.”

Jenna: “Log out. Now.”

Mom: “As your mother, it is my responsibility to monitor your internet activity. [to Ally] … and make sure she’s not chattin’ up any barneys“.

At this point, Jenna’s mom, Ally, and Tamara all laugh, but when Tamara turns to Jenna, who is not amused, she says, “Wait, what’s a barney?” Jenna’s response is, “I don’t know and I don’t care. We are not having a party!” There clearly is a generational gap, and barney makes us aware of it.

I was pleased to see the liberal use of the acronym DTR (“Define The Relationship”) in episode 4. This was a stimulus item I used for a study in my dissertation, the write-up of which is currently under revision. In that study, I wanted to see how people remember new words, with a particular emphasis on words that were actually brand spanking new, coined by speakers other than myself as an experimenter. This is important work to add to the field on new word learning. For adolescents and adults, social factors such as who would use a word and the contexts in which speakers use new words would presumably matter for memory and for subsequent diffusion of these words throughout society. So, not only is Awkward fascinating and funny, it also could be the source of new stimuli for my further experiments on word learning and the diffusion of lexical innovations.

Remembering the life and language of my grandma

Posted on September 4, 2011 by Paula

My grandma passed away at around 2:30 a.m. on September 1, 2011. She was 99, which means she was born in 1912, i.e. before World War I. She was an incredible woman. Here is a link to her obituary, if you’re interested. Here is a touching story that just appeared about all her good work, again in the Mankato Free Press. And here is probably the only tribute to a 99-year-old woman on Thrasher, the skateboarding website. So sweet to see how many lives she touched — thanks to everyone for all the kind words.

Grandma and me as I moved in to my new house. This day was probably my first memory of her.

Of the many memories I have of her, some of the most endearing — and revealing — were her speech patterns. She was fully cognizant until the end, reading the paper(s) daily up until a month before she died. Still, talking to her was often a window into another time, and I often took advantage in doing so, not just because she was nice and because she was my grandma, but also because she was so interesting. Unfortunately, I only thought of recording her talk after her voice had aged significantly. That wasn’t the way she spoke, and I didn’t want to remember her that way.

First, her laugh. She had the most beautiful and subtly distinctive laugh I’ve ever heard. It was three “ha ha ha”s, evenly spaced and not hurried, like quarter notes in three-four time. The timbre was smooth as water: “eh hahaha”, it would flow, followed by a smile, a little glance, and a twinkle in her eye. This laugh personified her: measured, polite, elegant.

In sociolinguistics, one often hears discussions of apparent time: this is the use of data from speakers at different age “strata”, taken at the same real time, to examine potential changes in linguistic patterns. The idea behind apparent time is that at least some aspects of speech patterns are “fossilized”, so that, say, my grandma never would never sound like a Valley Girl, despite all her contact with my, er, uptalk. In the case of my grandma, language change was perhaps responsible for what I now see as her speech particularities, who knows. Large Ns when studying the speech patterns of 99-year-olds are difficult to come by.

Grandma would pronounce most of the “berry” fruits the “English” way, that is, without secondary stress on the second syllable. This was especially apparent in the case of strawberry, which she would pronounce [stɹɔːbəɹi], while most American speakers (now?) say: [stɹɔbɛɹi]. Having lived in Minnesota all but one of her years (the other, in northern Iowa), I never once picked up on a Minnesotan accent. Her “o”s were diphthongized; the stereotypical Minnesota “o” is a monophthong, a remnant of the Scandinavian heritage in the state. In fact, in the southern part of the state, where Grandma hailed from, the Minnesota dialect is much less pronounced. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Central_American_English, which basically confirms everything in this paragraph (except the stuff about my grandma).

Grandma also never dropped the object of with prepositional phrases in many verbs of motion, as many Minnesotans and Wisconsonites, perhaps myself included, will do: “Do you want to come with?” People from other parts of the country report waiting for the end of the sentence when they hear this construction. “Do I want to come with… what? who?”, although given the context, the implied object is always perfectly clear: “come with” the speaker, and perhaps others.

I suspect that the preferred analysis is that for my upper Midwestern compatriots, with has been reanalyzed as an adverb, akin to the along adverbial definition of “in or into company with others”. Grandma, for example, would most often say “come along“, where here along is a bare adverbial form that I would think be completely acceptable to people everywhere in the U.S. (although my own judgements on such constructions could also be horribly different than non-Minnesotans): “Do you want to come along?” Sounds fine to me, if a bit formal now. That Grandma rarely, if ever, said “come with”, makes me think the with-adverbial construction is relatively recent.

One time about six years ago, to see who of us would do a task, Grandma said “Eenie meenie minie moe”. She paused for a second, then said, sort of out of the blue, “When I was young, some people would say, ‘Eenie meenie minie moe, catch a nigger by the toe.’” Then she looked around the room sternly, as if to reproach the past.

My brother and I stared at each other bug-eyed. I had never heard of that version before, and it was impressive that a 93-year-old recognized that it was inappropriate. I thought for a second: sadly, that version made sense. My version of “Eenie meenie” replaces nigger with tiger, a substitute with obvious phonetic similarities:

Eenie meenie minie moe,
Catch a tiger by the toe.
If he hollers, make him pay,
Fifty dollars every day.

I had never thought about it before, but tigers can’t holler, and you can’t make them pay you money. When the word nigger, and all the connotations it carries, became unacceptable in our society, the counting rhyme was only changed, not expelled altogether from the language.

Knowing this version through my grandma, I thought differently about the collaboration between Sean Kingston and Justin Bieber on “Eenie Meenie”. Sean Kingston is Black, and in this song, Biebs is basically trying to sound as Black as possible, a trope he works with verses such as: “Shorty is a eenie meenie minie moe lover” and “If she holla let her go.” Use of shorty and lack of third-person singular -s, here on holla, are typical of African-American English. So here we have Black and White artist collaborating, White artist trying to sound Black, and both of them using a rhyme that until 40 years ago was pretty damn racist. Progress? Irony? I’m not sure if you could chalk it up to White privilege, which is what Greg Tate would say. I’m currently reading his edited volume in Everything But the Burden: What White People are Taking from Black Culture. I mean, both artists are doing the same thing, and it is Sean Kingston’s song, after all.

But back to my grandma. Since I study the lexicon, Grandma’s vocabulary was particularly interesting to me, and she had a fairly big one. Not like constantly-busting-out-the-dollar-words big, but it did me smile to hear a 98-year-old use words like “subsequently”, “reprieve”, and “business model”. But in saying her vocabulary was large, I don’t mean to imply that people of her generation had larger vocabularies than today’s generations. That’s possible, I suppose, but I haven’t seen any empirical tests looking at this, and anyway, there’s a confound: older people have better verbal abilities in general, so by the time “kids these days” get to be their parents’ or grandparents’ age, they’ll have better verbal skills too. To adequately test the “kids these days” hypothesis, you’d have to test the two generations at the same age, waiting 50 or so years for the young’uns to grow up.

Verbal ability improves across the lifespan up to “young-old” adulthood; in this respect, it is unlike several other cognitive skills such as memory. People only start to show a decline in, say, understanding new words after the ages of 65-74, as this paper by McGinnis and Zelinski suggests. And check out this paper, “What and When of Cognitive Aging” by Timothy Salthouse, that shows a beautiful X-patterned figure in which vocabulary skills increase by age until 65, while scores for speed, reasoning, and recall all decline consistently after age 20. And across multiple studies, people just keep getting better at crossword puzzles, a skill requiring vocabulary recall (either cued or uncued, depending on how the board is filled out), until about age 65, at which point there is a leveling off. In any case, my grandma could have taken consolation in being, quite literally, off the charts in all of this research. The oldest participant tested was 87. I don’t remember her vocabulary at 87, but I do remember that she walked a mile pretty easily, and would still golf.

The last time I saw her was, luckily, just a week before she died. I was back in Minnesota for 36 hours (after Las Vegas) to pack up my stuff and drive up to Edmonton. My stepmom told me that Grandma had declined dramatically since I had last seen her a month ago, and that I might want to consider stopping by again. My stepmom does not say such things lightly, so I drove an hour and a half to have lunch with Grandma for an hour, then turned back and drove an hour and a half home.

By that point, she had pneumonia, and although she was coughing less than she had previously, every syllable was labored. She had stopped putting cornstarch in her water, a treatment she had for almost a year to help her swallow easier, because she hated the taste and texture. The last thing she said to me, after wishing me well in Canada, was, “I love you”. This may not seem surprising to most people, but my grandma was so reserved, she would never say it. I would often end our phone calls with “I love you Grandma”, and she would say, “Yep, goodbye now” with a smile in her voice. That she loved me was never in in question, but it was nice that when she knew it counted, she made her vocal folds churn out those last three syllables.

Las Vegas adventure II: the Steffi Graf airport encounter

Posted on August 30, 2011 by Paula

Las Vegas had been interesting, I decided upon leaving. But with not seeing Ray and not being able to enjoy the city as much as I would have liked (I was still working from the salary of a grad student who had hardly had any income all summer, and lots of expenses with moving), the non-professional side of the trip had been disappointing. Plus, I was looking forward to going home to Minnesota for all of 36 hours so as to see friends and family and pack my things to make the drive back up to Edmonton. Maybe I could come to Las Vegas another time, I was thinking at the airport. Maybe when there’s less chaos in my own life, I’ll be able to properly appreciate all the craziness of the Strip. Less chaos and more income.

The announcer called for boarding of my flight. So soon? I thought. I’d better go to the bathroom now.

If it weren’t for my small bladder and the ridiculous amounts of liquids I drink, I would have never run into Steffi Graf. I passed by Starbucks to get to the restrooms, and in doing so I saw a customer with an unmistakable nose. A little alarm went off in my head. Wait a second — Steffi Graf lives in Vegas now! I had read Andre Agassi’s excellent autobiography, Open, where he talks extensively about his relationship with Steffi. What a cute couple. I looked at this woman more. It was Steffi Graf! I was starstruck.

“Excuse me, are you… Steffi Graf?” I said quietly, not wanting to attract attention. She looked around to see if anyone had heard. “Yes,” she said.

Steffi Graf is the best women’s tennis player ever. When I was little, my mom and I would eat strawberries and cream and watch her kick the ass of whoever was unfortunate enough to be in her way. She won 22 Grand Slam singles titles. By comparison, Roger Federer has only won 16, and in tennis, women’s careers are usually shorter than men’s because they peak earlier physically — when they are still lacking valuable experience — and also because they often cut short their careers to focus on raising a family, which is difficult on the tour. Steffi was fierce, graceful, and talented. And, unlike many of the women’s tennis players today, winning was her top priority, not looking good. And here she was, eying the Starbucks options like a mere mortal. She was in excellent condition — some former players have kinda let themselves go, but I won’t name names. And she was beautiful.

In Open, Agassi talks about how the two of them started dating. Steffi was first dating some racecar-driver dude, but Andre, after very few interactions with Steffi, was smitten. He would call and send her flowers and be consistently rejected. But, he cleverly noticed, Steffi wouldn’t tell him, “Stop calling me, I don’t want to see you”, but rather something like, “My boyfriend is here. I can’t talk to you.” Steffi and racecar dude had been dating for six years, and Andre still had the guts to try to woo her. He asked her about this once on the phone, saying something like, “I heard you and your boyfriend have been dating for six years”, to which Steffi replies, “That’s right”. Andre then says, “Six years is a long time.” Steffi doesn’t respond. Andre can tell though, through her silence, that his comment strikes a chord. The two of them start dating shortly thereafter, and according to the book, it sounds like an excellent relationship. I always liked this love story because I think too many people settle into relationships that are comfortable for them, but not great. Once this happens, they are scared to back out. That was not the case with Steffi, and Andre’s prodding helped.

“Wow, that’s so cool! I’m a big fan, and I play tennis and I read Andre’s autobiography and I really liked hearing about how you two started dating, it was so cute,” I gushed. “I read all about the school too that you’ve started too, and I think you two are doing such great work.”

“Oh, thanks,” Steffi replied, smiling. In hindsight, I’m sure she just wanted her coffee, but I was worse than a teenage Justin Bieber fan and didn’t notice. I also realized then that Andre says Steffi is actually quite shy, and this realization added a very meta aspect to the conversation and prevented any possibility of my normally deft conversation skills surfacing.

“Would you mind taking a picture with me or something? Or an autograph? Whatever you prefer.” Now I don’t usually do this when meeting famous people but she is Steffi Graf, so I got a little, er, giddy.

“Sure, that’s fine,” Steffi said. I looked at the other Starbucks clients, but Steffi, wisely not wanting to attract attention, asked the person she was with, an older man, to take a picture with my phone. Andre was nowhere in sight, but who could this man be? His dad? Her dad? Neither were portrayed in a very favorable light in Open — I thought it best not to ask.

Steffi and I have just met, but already we're best buds.

After he took the picture, I was reasonable enough not to see how it looked or ask for another shot (I will say though that although Steffi is of course taller than me, this difference is magnified by the fact that she was wearing heels, and I flats). I thanked her and thought the best way of no longer being an obnoxious fan was to leave. But oh, I wish I would have told her how much I would watch her when I was little, or asked her opinion on the women’s game today, or asked her how it felt to win the Golden Slam in 1988. But instead, I went with the more recent stuff, the stuff I remembered more.

Lousy Linguist says if Steffi were playing today, she would be, at 42, in the top 10. It’s very possible, what with the lack of mental game the women nowadays bring to the table (other than Serena Williams, who has been plagued with injuries for the last five years, and Kim Clijsters, who had a baby two or so years ago). Steffi is amazing and I wish we could have talked more. But I will just have to realize that to her I am but one fan among thousands who tells her the same things.

words matter

paula chesley's non-peer-reviewed writings on language and other important affairs

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