The Lonely Philologist

Resolution

2011-07-20T13:31:00.001-07:00

So I promised myself that I would write a little bit every day on this blog. Today I have all sorts of things coursing through my mind: a conference abstract that I need to write, a research project I need to finish, but I keep getting distracted. While I keep telling myself that I'm not as in love with my cellphone as the gum-chewing 7th graders whose essays I've been reading looking for features of African American English, I keep finding myself drawn back to it and the feed it gives from the hive. For example, I've just spent five minutes reading (and chiming in from the peanut gallery) on a conversation on Facebook between two friends with diametrically opposed opinions that don't seem open to any compromise position. One participant presents an argument, "American tax rates are too low to be sustainable in a country where infrastructure and education are necessary for prosperity," while the other presents the counter-argument, "Taxes are theft."

So that got me thinking: what countries have no income taxation? Well, Brunei has no taxes. Alas, few of us want to live in Borneo. Andorra has no income taxes, but even I don't like sheep that much. Their major sources of revenue seem to be tourism and some exports. They have no military-industrial complex, are geographically small, and seem to be based largely around catering to people who want to hide their money from the places in which they make it.

When "objectivists" and "libertarians" talk about low-taxation countries and systems, do they even have a model that they're looking toward? I can think of some, but none of them are good. Feudal Europe had few personal income taxes, but no industrial base. Oh, and yeah, the overlords weren't that great either.

Anything worth blogging about?

2011-07-19T10:09:00.002-07:00

Another 13 months has gone by without my writing anything in this blog. I've done a little online writing for our Sigma Tau Delta blog, "How many English majors does it take...", but I haven't written anything of my own for quite a while. And after a very interesting book group meeting last week about "writers' notebooks," I decided that I would try my hand to see if I could manage a year's-worth of online writing to try to get me inspired for all the other writing I have to do. I don't know if there are any world traditions that start their years at July 19, but what's wrong with making a mid-year resolution?

Showing my students how to embed pictures...

2010-06-12T09:03:00.000-07:00

My own bad poetry...

2010-03-20T08:06:00.000-07:00

I've been at the Sigma Tau Delta convention in St. Louis this week/week-end, and I've listened to lots and lots of fabulous student papers, and amazing writers, but I've been inspired by one paper to write a poem myself. I'm sure it stinks to high heaven, because I'm a linguist, not a poet.

Twenty-seven volumes line the shelves,

covered in dust ripe with mold, mildewed in their neglect

redolent of the sweat of Scotsmen, Londoners, and colonials.

Once, James, Frederick, and Ronald argued that dwarves

mined out the soil, while the

dwarfs labored to bejewel

Snow White's crystalline coffin.

Twenty-seven volumes line the shelves,

awaiting undergraduate violence

perpetrated with simple-minded fingers

mining their onionskin pages,

scratching at pieces and parts, erasing histories,

flattening with timelines with over-painted or dirtied

fingernails; rhetorical blowtorches burn away

millennia of etymons, scorch the earth

beneath the feet of Saxons,

Romans, and Iberians. Oh, alas, how I sorrow for thee,

misused omnibus of transcendent words.

Wonderful New Book about Usage and Grammar

2010-01-01T09:43:00.001-08:00

I just read a review of Jack Lynch's Lexicographer's Dilemma in the New York Times. Anyone familiar with things Johnsonian or with things 18th century has long known of Lynch through his fabulous website and his other important contributions to the field. I'm eager to read his book and figure out how much he's covered what I'd hoped to write about 18th century grammars.

Anything but my grading!

2009-12-14T10:05:00.000-08:00

The peculiar rhythms of academic life do little but alienate us from our fellow human beings. A staff member in at our snack bar asked me earlier if I was ready for Christmas. Have I ever been ready for Christmas? Or have I been ready for Christmas since 1995? No, because I chose to spend my holiday preparations on wedding preparations!

Between grading, posting grades, and preparing for the MLA (which, mercifully, will be moving into January to ease the alienation), the whole holiday season gets short shrift. I can't even imagine how it is for friends and colleagues who celebrate Hanukkah, who must juggle holiday and final examinations. So I've decided that English faculty members round the world need to embrace Twelfth Night as their anchor point for the holiday season. Besides the clear Shakespearean references that can be exploited, Twelfth Night offers at least 14 days of free and clear holiday preparation after final grades are submitted. Moreover, academics (always in a state of genteel poverty--as one favorite graduate school professor described) could exploit "day after Christmas" sales to stretch their dollars. Integrate king's cake and wassail into the mix and we could have quite a festive holiday.

So friends, expect not Christmas cards from me. Oh no! If you get a card, it shall be a Twelfth Night card, mailed on January 2.

As the Year Draws to a Close...

2009-12-03T16:50:00.000-08:00

I can't help but think of all the things the early days of December signify to the academic:

The crushing regret of all the things that should have been said as the semester progressed that were left unsaid;
The horrific realization that half the things that one believed one said were said in years past;
The impossibility of a fully realized holiday season and promptly posted grades.

So for those of you who live in the limbo that is end of the fall semester, Happy Holidays, Happy Grading, and my condolences.

Looking for New Blends

2009-10-26T10:23:00.000-07:00

I was reading a marvelous essay yesterday evening by the former Editor in Chief of the now-defunct Portfolio magazine, Joanne Lipman, on challenges to women in the workplace in the last ten years, largely after 9/11. Well, long story short: she brought up references to Hillary's "cankles." And it got me wondering about the cultural and historical conditions necessarily to facilitate blending. It's really a counter-intuitive process, really, and I can't help but wonder if there's some reason why there are so many blended terms showing up here and there.

The classic blend, of course, is "smog"--from "smoke" and "fog." And there's a nice logic to the equation. The two source words are both monosyllabic, both ending in a velar stop consonant. So they seem like a marriage made in, well, Los Angeles.

But what about "cankles." How logic defying? "Calf"--a monosyllable--meetd up with "ankle"--an unattractive double syllable--and somehow gives birth to "cankle," a word as displeasing as the supposed intersection of the two structures on one's lower extremity.

So are there new rules for blends? I'd love to come up with a catalog of these (in my copious spare time, of course) and see if the combinatory conditions that facilitate a blend have changed somehow in the last twenty years. Intuitively, I say "Yes." Of course, I've also learned that anecdotal evidence is the worst, so I'm looking for something testable here.

Has it been eight months?

2009-10-09T11:00:00.000-07:00

It's so startling to think that it's been nearly eight months, by my poor mathematical reckoning, since I've written a blog post. Of course, such gaps call into question the necessity for the existence of the blog itself. So, in that spirit (and because I've been teaching about morphology), I've decided to write about the word 'blog.'

The well-known explanation of 'blog' that it represents a clipped form of the compound 'weblog.' In its original form, computer logs were simply collections of log-in data: who accessed files and when. When discussion boards went into web-based form, html recorded discussions started taking this log form, and then it spiraled out of control. Of course, this is seriously simplified version of the history of the 'blog.' A well-researched and documented explanation appears on a blog about blogs (which reminds me that I need to write about 'meta' as a verb form) provides a much longer and fuller picture of their history.

But my question is really about these personal blogs: public diaries that gain an audience. The blog has called into question the nature of new media (is unfiltered, unedited content truly authoritative--and should we long for authority anymore anyway) as well as the nature of privacy. Even if blogs really seem to be read by niche groups (one's Facebook friends and the like), what does it mean when we write something incendiary? If we don't intend harm, but harm happens anyway, what responsibility does the blogger have?

Now, I find it unlikely, as a comparatively private person who values the effect of the well-told narrative, that I would ever disclose such things. But what is my responsibility as a reader of blogs? If a blogger reveals too much, should I pretend the text doesn't exist, in the same way I ignore the existence of Twilight or bad Harlequin romance novels? Obviously, my attempt to ignore them has failed, since I can still name them. But perhaps their insertion into this discussion reveals something significant, from a psychoanalytic perspective. Perhaps one problem of the blog emerges from its original compound: as a "log," does a weblog create expectations of a particular kind in its readers.

Consider the OED definition for log, n 1, 7d: "Any record in which facts about the progress or performance of something are entered in the order in which they become known; e.g. (a) a record of what is found, or how some property varies, at successive depths in drilling a well; a graph or chart displaying this information; (b) a record kept by a lorry driver in which details of journeys are noted; (c) a record kept of what is broadcast by a radio or television station from moment to moment."

A log, as is clear from this definition, records objectively verifiable information. It tells, in an empirical sense, the truth.

But no matter our faith in a narrator, readers never expect a story about oneself to be entirely and completely true. As Bakhtin says, every hero is his own ideologue: he expresses his own truth, damn all the others. So perhaps the word 'blog,' having been clipped so unceremoniously from its original compound, has taken on a fictive connotation. The 'blog' is a new genre: extemporaneous, perhaps, but with a profoundly individualized subjectivity inseparable from the writer.

Startled to discover it's almost March

2009-02-27T12:05:00.000-08:00

March always sneaks up on me. I've never really known if it was because February slips by so quickly, or whether March has some nefarious magic that makes it arrive more aggressively than all the other months of the year. While "April is the cruelest month" (my nod to T.S. Eliot) by far, March reminds us that all things pass and fade away.

March's name alone suggests the militaristic push forward, descended as it is from the Roman god Mars; but its homophony with the kind of march one is forced upon also strikes me as particularly cruel. When March first arrives, we're reminded that we're likely to be trampled under the feet of midterm examinations and papers, and that MLA submission deadlines are not far behind. We're also reminded that winter closes away and we need to begin preparations for our summer. For academics, this usually means that we have to figure out how we're supporting ourselves over the summer, since we're usually only paid 10 months of the year.

So as you prepare to turn in (or grade) those midterm papers, or clean out your closet of all the clothes you've outgrown this winter, just remember to "Beware the Ides of March." March 15 falls on Sunday this year.

Wacky Wordle

2008-09-29T13:27:00.000-07:00

Wordle clouds have gone up on doors all over my department in the last few months, and I've longed for time to stuff a bit of Beowulf into the engine and see what happens. I was amazed to see that the engine generated a beautiful tree, albeit composed of graffiti-like characters. But the output seemed appropriately Germanic.

Returning to school term stride

2008-09-25T08:09:00.000-07:00

My last report suggested that I was struggling to get into the rhythm of the semester (of course, I struggle to spell rhythm correctly as well), but I've managed. Now that the regular ebb and flow of classes and meetings, grading and reading, has become accustomed again after its long summer absence, I'm once again contemplating the world in my peculiar lexicographical and philological way.

So "Little Miss Sunshine," as I like to call my oldest daughter, recently made a great leap forward in reading. She's gone from angrily protesting her mandated fifteen minutes of reading a day, to grudgingly enjoying alternating pages of reading with her mom, to, now, digesting whole non-fiction "chapter books" in the course of two days. Her favorites are the "Who was..." series: she zipped through the second half of Who Was Queen Elizabeth?, which we bought her at the Smithsonian, by herself (much to my disappointment, since I enjoyed reading it with her). Now she's onto Who Was King Tut?

Of course, I doubted that she was reading with sufficient comprehension without my over-the-shoulder guidance, so I gave her a little quiz when she got home yesterday: "So, Sunshine, what was the Rosetta Stone?" I fully expected the "Mom, it's an overly priced language learning software that you've refused to buy me. "

Instead, I got: "It's how they decoded hieroglypics. Do you want to see my name in hieroglypics? I wrote it during quiet time." (Astonished silence-- I examined the bookmark S decorated with her cartouche.) "The Rosetta stone had Hieroglypics, Greek, and Demonic."

So here was my quandary: should I correct her when her own explanation is so much funnier than the reality?

Well, of course I did, lest she come up with any kooky Sarah Palin-like explanations of the history of language. Even though "hieroglyphics" and "Demotic" weren't as pleasing to her, she integrated them into her later discussions of the book.

No posts recently

2008-09-10T13:37:00.000-07:00

As many of my imagined readers have probably figured, I haven't been writing because I've been juggling the onset of the fall semester. Lots of new names, some successful associations with faces, and many new texts have been running through my mind at full speed.

Circumstances this semester dictate that I have to post recordings of my History of the English class on our course management system. Thus, I have entered the murky waters of "pod-casting." Immediately, therefore, I contemplate the absurdity of analogy as a lexical generator. "Broadcast" referred originally to the broad casting of seeds; broad functioned as an adverb on the verb cast. So the word "podcast" should suggest two things to us: the early radio stations cast broads about the countryside as they sent their radio waves singing about, or we're casting about pods ready to envelope their listeners. Either description makes me chuckle in my little lexicographical way.

New wastes of time

2008-08-15T11:56:00.000-07:00

So I've been spending a lot of time on Ancestry.com, my newest diversion from everything else that I really should be doing. But I recognize that what I'm doing is as far from real genealogy as stickfigures are from Michaelangelo's Sistine Chapel. If anything, Ancestry.com allows me to piggy-back on the work that real genealogists and archivists have done over the years as well as that of all of the (I'm certain) underpaid librarians, library-assistance, summer interns, and well-meaning archive volunteers.

The sheer documentary volume is overwhelming. There are hundreds of years of census records, immigration records, and everything else that they advertise. What have I learned? Patterns tend to repeat over generations. My own family represents a virtual matriarchy. I can trace back mother's mother's mother's families back to 1049 (I'm not kidding!) but the father's lines all seem to dry up after one or two generations: all of them. Or, they have the most common names of their generations. Let us take for granted my great-great-grandfather on my mother's side, Samuel Maxwell. We've had these little daguerreotypes of two forlorn little girls in the family for years and never have known from whence they issued. Turns out, according to the 1870 that Ol' Sam was a daguerreotype artist (his listed profession). But of his origin? Nothin'.

Which brings us to the most significant mystery man (in my opinion) to be shaken out of the proverbial tree, Samuel Steele. As you might guess from the overall euphony of the name, there were quite a few Sam Steeles alive during the Civil War who fought on both sides. And I've got nothing but my grandfather's death certificate to say he existed: no marriage records, no death records (or at least none that I can assert are definitely my Sam Steele and not another's), nada, zilch. As if he did not exist. And this pattern recurs over and over again.

So what have I learned? Believe it or not, I've learned something sociolinguistic: can we look at paternal heritage as a reliable indicator of immigration effects? For whom does the founder effect matter? For men or women? Or have I just learned that I need a full genealogy for my husband to pass on to my daughters?

OED a-zed

2008-08-08T07:42:00.001-07:00

I forgot to post this review of a cool new book; it had escaped my radar until Christie "facebooked" it to me: Ammon Shea, Reading the OED: One Man, One Year. As a committed browser, I don't think I could launch such an endeavor. Of course, my favorite word of the day: haver, "1. intr. To talk garrulously and foolishly; to talk nonsense." Fans of The Proclaimers will recognize it. The definition certainly foregrounds the irony of "500 Miles."

Anticipating the beginning of classes...

2008-08-08T06:55:00.000-07:00

I've always thought August and April were two of the worst months in academic life: in April, we're all scrambling to figure out everything that we need to teach our students before the term ends, remembering everything we were supposed to complete during the academic year, and thinking hopefully toward everything we're going to accomplish in the summer, which we've inflated in time three-fold. Once August first arrives, academics are consumed with anxiety and regret, wishing we were Doctor Who and could turn our internal clocks back.

I know I always think, "If only I had only slept three hours a night all summer, I could have finished every project that I'm behind on. I could have made every missed deadline." As the middle of the month arrives, the prospect of incomplete syllabi looms on the horizon just as my babysitter goes on her yearly vacation. So here I am, with two kids home until the college opens, with two unrealized syllabi in my mind.

But all this angst isn't really as bad as the two preceding paragraphs would suggest. The big regrets of the summer so far are really 1) failing to see more movies and 2) failing to complete Darwin's Origin of the Species. I promised myself I would read the whole book before returning to school so that I could arm myself with textual evidence to use against those who doubt the reality of evolution, since the term inevitably comes up in the history of the English language. I'm not entirely sure how applicable the term "evolution" is to the study of language, necessarily, since the same processes of natural selection don't really apply to linguistic phenomena, but I am certain that evolution really happens and that we see it every day.

So my new strategy, as a professor, is to ask doubters two questions: 1) Do you have a dog? If so, what "breed" is it? and 2) Do you think that bacteria can become drug-resistant? If so, why would that happen? Darwin begins his discussion of evolution with reflections on animal breeding and the "unnatural selection" of farmers and breeders for particular traits in their animals. If breeders can select for traits that don't confer an advantage in terms of survival, other than the advantage offered by increased human protection and nurture, why shouldn't nature (the most fickle and cruelest guardian of all) confer some advantage on animals best suited to their environments?

What, then, is the relationship between language and evolution? I guess the question we have to ask is this: what advantage does language confer upon us, the organisms who use it? No particular language itself would seem to confer more advantage to one particular group than another, but certain linguistic behaviors may; we might want to think of borrowing as an adaptive behavior or other sorts of contact phenomena as adaptive. Or we might want to look at periods of dramatic social, environmental, and cultural change as periods that might encourage linguistic diversity that allows competing forms to develop. Are those features best adapted to new circumstances, or that confer the greatest advantage to particular groups (or that are associated with groups that have the greatest advantages overall), the features that survive?

These will all be questions I'll be thinking about this semester--when it comes. Until then, I'll try to catch a movie or two.

William Safire's charge to lexicographers

2008-07-20T14:36:00.000-07:00

In today's "On Language" column, William Safire spurred lexicographers to get with the program, produce entries describing "inartful," and pay homage to him for recognizing and critiquing the term when Mario Cuomo used it as a political dodge years ago.

Safire's article, full to the brim with his usual language-maven bravado, reflects two fascinating things (at least to me) about our lexicographical culture.

1) Immediately after reminding us of his political affiliations (his words once issued forth from Richard Nixon's vocal tract), Safire declares his lexicographical affinities: no liberal Webster's Third or Anglophile OED for him, no sir. Safire's strictly a Funk and Wagnall's man. While a lovely dictionary, no title connotes conservatism quite so well, from its infelicitous prosody to its well-established association with prescriptive usage. The dictionaries we choose reveal our politics almost as quickly as the purposes to which we put them.

2) We attribute coinages to speakers on the way up the prestige ladder rather than those on their way down. Cuomo's original use of "inartful" became just another example of the Governor's bobbing and weaving (and putative liberal illiteracy) for Safire. And Safire, although a champion of literate usage and an established language maven, simply won't influence speakers on the ground. While he may use a word and define it for his plebian readers, said plebes are unlikely to take it up (or ignore it) because Safire has told us to. Thus, a first citation, while an important stop on the train toward dictionary inclusion, isn't Penn Station; it's Far Rockaway. Barack Obama has done more to cement "inartful" as a potential "word of the year" than all the Safire columns in the world.

So what does all this suggest: 1) I can't ride the subway without a map (took my daughter to the American Museum of Natural History via Queens last week); 2) I read William Safire; 3) my "dictionaries in the news" search is playing itself out. I think I need a new heuristic. Look it up. It's a lovely word.

Crafty words

2008-07-02T12:26:00.000-07:00

So my friend Melinda encouraged me to join Ravelry.com. They have a profile page, which will feed in anything you've written to your blog; so I've figured I'm obliged to write a self-referential or intentionally circular blog posting about the relationship between the philologist self and the knitting and crafting self. I've always been crafty--one of my happiest memories was the faux sky I painted on my closet door in the first apartment I had all to myself. Moreover, I faux marbled cardboard bookshelves that lined my walls. Essentially, I've always enjoyed spreading paint, glue, and other substances all over everything I could get my hands on. But paper crafts require scissors, glues, paints, and powders, all of which are intrinsically incompatible with an infant or toddler.

Not that knitting needles are necessarily safer--but they are easier to control and deflect away from eyes, ears, and other areas--so I've taken up knitting to fill my fidgeting hours. But I was thinking of the rich vocabulary that comes along with all these hobbies. Each activity has its own jargon, some more ridiculous than others. I'm fascinated that this knitting website has revived, or assisted in reviving a somewhat archaic term. A "ravel" from the Dutch word, rafel, according to the OED, originally meant a " A tangle, complication, entanglement; a cluster." Meanings soon seem to distinguish themselves into the attributions of such a cluster, such as a "loose thread." Since "ravel" appears to come from a Dutch weaving term meaning to "unweave," I'm truly perplexed why we would need "unravel" at all.

At least I was perplexed until I figured out that the Dutch prefix 'ont-', which the OED suggests appears in the Dutch source of unravel, ontrafelen, does not only suggest reversal, but a sense of irreversibleness. Therefore, a weaver who was to have ontrafelen a textile would be unable to do it again--presumably because the textile would have ceased to exist.

Now my question is this: have folks back-formed a word "ravel" to suggest the putting together of textiles, or are they simply acknowledging the fact that any knitter, especially a comparatively new knitter such as I, spends a great deal of time repetitively knitting and unknitting the same garment until satisfied with the result? I shall ask and report back my findings.

Leadership in an Internet World

2008-06-10T07:30:00.000-07:00

So I just read a very interesting piece about Barak Obama as the "Wiki-candidate"in the New York Times and the essay got me to thinking about the tension between leadership and collaboration. "Collaboration," of course, comes straight from the element "labor," and, and thus, means "to work together." The OED provides a citation from 1860 as the first printed instance of the word; I can't help but notice that date as significant.

Charles Reade, in whose Eighth Commandment, the word appears, as an adaptation of the French "collaborateur," shared clear sympathies with trade unionists and the language of the trade union permeates his work. The Eighth Commandment, begins with a description of "literary commerce," which is like all other "trades and transactions." So although the French "collaborateur" has early on a literary sense (the OED cites 1801 as the first instance of the word as a non-nativized form meaning "One who works in conjunction with another or others; esp. in literary, artistic, or scientific work."), I can't help but think that the other connotations of labor circulating in the 19th century wouldn't have colored Reade's usage as well.

In the quasi-allegorical section in which "collaboration" appears, the "collaborateur" is alternately described as a "literary accomplice," an "associated calligrapher," and a "copyist." In effect, the allegory suggests the exploitation of the "co-writer" for the gain of the bigger name and plays with the notion of the "literary source." Nevertheless, Reade suggests that the collaborateur, under the copyright treaties of the period, comes out on the fuzzy end of the lollipop.

So I find the now positive sense of "collaboration," especially in the sense of web-based collaboration (witness Wikipedia, etc.) quite interesting. No matter how many people collaborate on a single project, glory (and blame) is difficult to distribute, and inevitably goes to the leader. A collaborator, in the literary sense, remains the secondary entity--the second name in the list, the person forgotten. A quick survey of great collaborators will serve: the economic philosophy is not "MarxandEngelism" but Marxism. No one remembers Pierre Curie, only his wife, who hasn't even retained her first name. Few have heard of Roy Mottelson, but many would recognize the name Niels Bohr.

What, therefore, does the collaborator risk? Must a collaborator be comfortable with anonymity? What is the reward for collaboration? And which leader should be applauded? The leader who values collaboration or the leader who shuns it? All that said, I believe that a leader who values collaboration, encourages it, and spurs it, is much better for any community, because there is less likelihood of tyranny; but I fear that a leader who honors collaboration might be perceived, come election-time as deficient compared to a more autocratic personality. Perhaps the key to success for Democrats will consist in a change in our understanding of collaboration. The collaborator musn't be the uncredited ghost-writer, or the power behind the throne, but the workman set to a task in service of an overwhelmingly clear vision.

Popular and popularity...

2008-06-05T20:23:00.000-07:00

Two factors intersected to produce today's post. 1) The seven-year old came home with one of those "nobody likes me, everybody hates me, I might as well eat dirt" attitudes, because she wasn't picked to distribute cupcakes; and 2) We're reading C. S. Lewis's Preface to Paradise Lost in my summer course. Lewis distinguishes between popular and court poetry. For him, popular is truly "of the people," rather than "beloved of the people."

For the seven-year old, the definition appears to be "recognized as worthy irrespective of one's attitude toward the people." I would hazard a guess that this definition arises from the characterization of adolescents on tv, where the "popular" tend to be both admired and despised without evidence of any inherent worthiness.

Contemplating the Canon

2008-06-03T08:14:00.000-07:00

My department has been talking a great deal about the "Canon" (big 'c' and one 'n'--so not the kind that goes "boom, boom"), while at the same time I've been reviewing C. S. Lewis's The Discarded Image. I've often toyed with the idea of requiring students to read DI before they begin reading early British literature, because Lewis explains the rhetorical and cultural foundations that underlie much of British lit--he explains the Ptolemaic universe, the neo-Platonic personifications that we find sprinkled through Renaissance literature, and foregrounds the role that world-view plays in the construction of art.

But Lewis also uses the term "canon" slightly differently.

We have therefore had to supplement the canon of saving the phenomena by another canon--first, perhaps, formulated with full clarity by Occam. According to this second canon we must accept (provisionally) not any theory which saves the phenomena but that theory which does so with the fewest possible assumptions. (15)

Lewis uses "canon" in the sense that derives from its ecclesiastical and legal sense; the OED defines "canon" as "A general rule, fundamental principle, aphorism, or axiom governing the systematic or scientific treatment of a subject." Yet this meaning also extends into the literary realm and, thus, become "canons of criticism, taste, art."

So all this has got me wondering about the "literary canon." When we speak of the literary canon, "The body of literary works traditionally regarded as most important," can we really now think in terms of a "body," a physically constrained set of texts, with a physical terminus? If we think of a literary canon as a physical entity, a body, it must be a corpse, not a living thing. We should note the tense and mood of each of the verbs in the OED's citations:

1929 Amer. Lit. 1 95 Those who read bits of Mather with pleasure will continue to feel that those bits cannot be excluded from the canon of literature until much excellent English ‘utilitarian’ prose is similarly excluded.

1953 W. R. TRASK tr. E. R. Curtius European Lit. & Lat. Middle Ages xiv. 264 Of the modern literatures, the Italian was the first to develop a canon. 1989 Times Lit. Suppl. 7 July 739 My Secret History..alludes to half the modernist canon, from Eliot to Hemingway to Henry Miller. 1999 N.Y. Rev. Bks. 4 Nov. 29/2 The canon was under attack from feminists and social historians who saw it as the preserve of male and bourgeois dominance.

The canon, the body of literature, is acted upon in each of these citations--it's the result of assemblage; it's the development of a national "Genius"; it's a source for allusion; or it's a refuge under siege.

Would we better off to think of the word "canon," for literary purposes, as a set of rules for interpretation rather than a body of texts? If we have "canons for interpretation," we can apply those rules wherever we please and our technique becomes more important than the object upon which we act. Perhaps my concerns are merely semantic--but what is literature without words/

Ish

2008-04-14T10:08:00.000-07:00

Well, it's taken a month for me to recover from the horror of showing my blog to my students in class. I don't know how well the blog activity is going, other than the fact that they seem to be reading slightly more broadly than they were before.

But in lexical matters, I'd like to talk about "ish." About a month and a half ago, my seven year-old lexical innovator, we'll call her "Little Miss Sunshine," started using "ish" as a full lexeme, with a meaning equivalent to "sort of." She'd use it as a post-positive qualifier, as in this brief exchange we had the day after Nickelodeon's Kid Choice Awards:
"Mom, I think Miley Cyrus is just ish. She's not great. Just ish."
"Is that right? So you don't like Hannah Montana."
"She's just not rock and roll enough, mom."

Now, after recovering from the horror that my daughter is so far out of the mainstream of seven year-old life that she prefers Tegan and Sara to Hannah Montana, I began wondering where she got this usage. Lately I've seen a number of "tween" tv shows (yes, I watch them--never let your children watch television alone), as well as grown-up shows where characters use an "emphatic -ish."

In last week's Time, magazine, however, the word emerged from its Urbandictionary.com and seven year-old lexicon into the mainstream media.

So, does this hearken back to the clipping of "-bus" from "omnibus"? And is this really evidence of the lexical nature of derivational morphemes?

The Limits of Written Discourse

2008-03-17T08:41:00.001-07:00

Today I'm embarking on a journey into unknown territory and overused platitudes. I've decided to incorporate informal public writing, like the words that I write right now, into my first-year composition course here at TCNJ. The purpose of my course is to get students thinking about the ways that they might use writing to affect the world around them and it seems to be that blogs are working toward that end--there appear to be millions of these open journals floating about the internet and someone seems to be reading just a few. But my question is this: who is reading, for what purpose, and to what end? I keep thinking of all the things that I could write in this online space and keep finding myself constrained my my own shyness or sense of modesty. At what point does a public blog begin to interfere with my public face?

Blogs seem to exist in this no-man's land between private discourse and public discourse. If one has a Gmail account, as I do, then I don't believe one can make a blog private. And what would be the point anyway? I'm not inclined toward gossiping about colleagues (at least by name or institution), nor am I inclined toward saying mean things about my students or my relatives, so why would I want to keep this journal private and keep myself anonymous?

I suppose there's always the fear that I could be taken to task for bad prose, or for self-indulgent prose, or, worst of all, for grammatical errors! In the grand scheme of things, how bad could that be? Perhaps I could embarrass myself with a short list of my hobbies (paper-crafts--a clever euphemism for scrapbooking and stamping-- and knitting), although they are quite tame. My political inclinations are also quite public (I'm a Democrat for those who care, although I still haven't made up my mind about the election. I ducked the primary.). My own disappointments are fairly public as well: I received a few "we regret to inform you" letters this morning about on-campus funding--nothing I didn't expect. It's been hard to recapture my scholarly enthusiasm and energy after the birth of my youngest daughter. It's substantially more difficult to be a professional and a mother of two than it was to be a professional and a mother of one little girl who grows more independent by the day. Once I had two, my oldest seem to be more insistent about my time commitments to her. But all this isn't unusual.

So what am I so afraid of? Why do I fear letting my hair down in such a way that someone might want to read? Perhaps that's the fear itself: blogging presupposes that there are readers out there. And when a writer surrenders words to a reader, she loses control of their interpretation. She can't pull the page back. Once it's been read, the words are gone and in another's mind, never to return to the writer's control. Now I ask my students to do the same as first-year college students, albeit on a smaller stage. Our online courseware system, SOCS, has a blog function, so their writing will only be visible to their peers. But it will be visible to them. So, lest I be a hypocrite, I have to keep writing my blog which no one reads; just because someone might.

New Words from the Field

2008-03-15T06:14:00.000-07:00

According to the "dashboard" of Blogger, it's been ten days since I've posted any comments. Our students had tremendous success in Louisville, Kentucky, at the Sigma Tau Delta convention. We won a best chapter and best website award, two students won for writing two of the best papers of the convention, and two students won $4000 worth of scholarships. My goal for next year is for our students to win $10000 worth of scholarships from different sources, not just from the national organization.

In addition to some very bad behavior from certain south central faculty members (one made a student cry through the sheer force of her hateful polemic), I also heard a few innovative (at least to my approaching-middle-age ears) usages. On one short story panel, a student referenced the "Emo poetry we all write in high school" as she explained the point of her story.

I found this term an interesting semantic weakening or generalization. I thought that the qualifier "emo" referred to a musical genre of punk rock, exemplified by Fugazi. Clearly, it's a clipping of "emotional" or "emotive."

So I suppose this young poet intended "emo" to serve as a synonym for "adolescent angst." What I find so interesting is that her usage presupposes a dependence upon the conventions of this genre and subculture for the composition of this type of poetry; those of us with greater age can see that the poetry is simply a function of adolescence.

The News from "Lulville"

2008-03-05T17:49:00.000-08:00

Ten students from our local chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, the national English honor society, are presenting critical and creative work at this year's national convention in Louisville, Kentucky. I'm eagerly anticipating rich regional variation, but, so far, all I've heard is the pronunciation "Lullville"--parodied to great amusement on local street signs. With any luck, I'll have more to report that is much more interesting.

When research doesn't seem to pay off...

2008-03-01T09:22:00.001-08:00

In stolen minutes here and there I've been trying to do some genealogical research to reconstruct the history of my oft-fractured family. My father and my maternal grandmother were both estranged from their respective families. The generations are so extended (my grandmother was born in 1881 and my father in 1913) that the records for my great-grandparents are very difficult to find on my father's side.

I almost feel as if I can find more evidence about Anglo-Saxon England than about my own family history. I'll continue to post as I discover more about Rosa Ellen Maxwell (my maternal great grandmother) and Samuel Steele (my paternal great grandfather).

Dictionaries in the News

2008-02-29T10:44:00.001-08:00

Today I decided to add a "dictionaries in the news" element to my blogorama...How much do they come up? How are they used? Well, there's this gem from the NYTimes on Hillary Clinton's expression, a "bird-dog minute," courtesy of ever lexically dependable William Safire. If it isn't a southernism (bird-dog as verb appears first in a Galveston newspaper in the even more dependable OED), than it's certainly a westernism and something that should suggest that she is conversant with the practices of the outdoor sport.

And then, finally, I've been musing about "misunderestimate." It seems to have become a way to poke fun at Republican campaigners, but I fear that its constant use by CNN newsheads will lend it some credibility. What has been Bush's lexical legacy? How have his malapropisms poisoned our pool of words? In one hundred years, will Olympic high jumpers misunderestimage the height of the pole? And what would that mean anyway? Can one underestimate accurately to begin with? Just some philological thoughts...

Nine minutes til the bus...

2008-02-28T12:32:00.000-08:00

I guess one point of blogging is that one should write every day. Is this correct? Okay...well I have eight minutes until the first grade bus departs my daughter's school and I switch into full mommy mode. So I created a "tcnjenglishbooks" wiki where the TCNJ English department could start talking about our favorite books, or books we've read, or, I suppose, even books we wish to read. I wanted to be quiet about it, but word's gotten out and it's out of my control. I guess that wikis aren't supposed to be controlled. I find it all very disturbing.

More about dictionaries: I did a dictionary task with my students today in my writing course that I think was very provocative and says a great deal about how we read. I asked them to read George Will's editorial, McCain in a Glass House.

My students read it and got the gist of his argument that John McCain isn't as pious as he seems. Once I asked them to identify words they didn't feel confident about (anonymously--I wrote mine on the board: condign), we looked them up in my favorite, the OED. Then we worked over the text with the meanings in their head. They seemed to get more out of it a second time.

It still makes me think about the core question: how do readers decide if they're going to read dictionaries?

So you've got a blog...big deal. Who doesn't?

2008-02-27T11:26:00.000-08:00

Well, I've started thinking a great deal about blogging. What does it mean to keep a blog? Is a blog a journal that you write and reveal to the world? Is it a public diary? Why would you want to have a public diary? Yuck.

But a blog might be a space where I can reflect on things that I worry about but don't vocalize; perhaps it's a space where I can say something scholarly in a way that won't bore people to tears. Then again, it might. Perhaps a blog might be another site of rejection: what happens if you write a blog that no one reads?

So I've been thinking about dictionaries a lot lately (another sigh from the non-existent audience--"What's new about that?"), and wondering why using a dictionary, apart from Dictionary.com, seems to be so difficult for so many people. In fact, I just came from a presentation where a colleague reported that her students (who are also my students) struggled with words like "paradoxically," "ubiquitous," and other words that I thought were "ubiquitous" enough in everyday college discourse that they should be able to recognize them. But do we ask our students to read so much so quickly that they fear stopping and looking up an unfamiliar word in a dictionary?

Or are readers afraid of dictionaries? Is there something intimidating about a dictionary? Do we fear being wrong about the meaning of a word? These are just questions...but perhaps I can find some answers.

Whew...no misspellings found. I guess I can publish now.