OED a-zed

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...

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

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

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

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...

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

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/