Wacky Wordle

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

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

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

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

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.