Category Archives: Vocabulary

Father’s Day special: The language of my dad

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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.

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

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[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.

Awkward's Jenna Hamilton in hallway

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

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 insults Jenna

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

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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.