Sithel

Dear Internet Denizen,

You may be interested in purchasing some algorithmically-glitched apparel courtesy of the Glitch Logos bot. We have several fine designs available. They may cause people to remark, “That design is distressing to me.”

Sincerely,
The Management

Your linguist name is your name but in IPA.

liskantope:

While cycling today I had the most random thought: that it would be cool if a larger fraction of the populace were as interested in linguistics as I am, because then we could have TV documentaries like “Top 10 Most Extreme Phonologies” (which would have to include Hawaiian, Ubykh, and of course Pirahã).

“The Grice Is Right: Come on down and figure out which Gricean Maxims are relevant!”

“Girls: An extensive docu-drama of young women’s linguistic innovation from around the world”

“The X-bar Files” 

Emoji can be used like punctuation and T-Rex of Dinosaur Comics is ON IT. (Just wait till he finds out about about the upcoming dinosaur emoji.)

Just a small creature this week. I’m not sure he’d be much use at hunting dragons, he looks to me more like a spaniel who thinks he’s fierce.

I made two changes from the original ms, the first being the colour. I moved away from the original blue because he’s trotting along underneath a big blue horse, and that would have been too much blue. The second was that on the principle of blank space is a very bad thing in medieval art, I put a flower on the end of his tail. Although I’m not so sure it’s a flower, it could be a decorative version of those spiky clubs some dinosaurs had on the end of their tails?

Don’t ask me the name of the dinosaur though, it could have been Gilbert for all I know…

Another article unnecessarily criticizing filler words, this time in the New York Times; another blog post debunking it, this time by Jena Barchas-Lichtenstein. Excerpt of the blog post:  

Among the many types of discourse markers are a subset sometimes known as verbalized pauses. People who are not linguists also call them “filler words” and “verbal crutches,” but those terms are misleading.

Why don’t we just get rid of them, the NYT article asks. After all, “verbal fillers that can make you sound, you know, nervous or not so smart.”

Well.

These kinds of pauses do give us time to think of what we’ll say next — but that’s not all they do. Compare the examples below with and without the discourse markers.

They allow us to soften disagreement or criticism by making it somewhat more polite.

• The thing is, she worked really hard.
• Um, it’s my not my favorite.

They emphasize whatever it is we’re going to say next.

• My teacher is, like, a total nutjob.

They allow us to introduce delicate topics.

• Sooooo, um, how are things at home?
• Have you, ah, thought any more about counseling?

They communicate subtle nuances of emotional stance.

• I’m feeling, you know, not too bad about that exam.

They allow us to indicate our degree of certainty.

• I must have had, like, seven hundred pages of reading to do.
• She was, I think, pretty pissed off.

As you can see, these discourse markers do an immense amount of important social and emotional work for us. They add nuance and richness to our speech. In fact, we can’t be socially appropriate human beings without them. Even if we got rid of particular markers — if we stopped saying um and so and like — we’d just end up using new ones in their place. […]

Mele writes: “Speakers who are well known in their professions but overuse verbal pauses are still perceived as credible because they have built a reputation. Audience members will chalk up those habits to just the way they talk, Ms. Marshall said. … But newcomers who use as many interjections as seasoned professionals will be seen as less credible because they do not have the years of experience.”

Yet he stops short of the obvious conclusion: there’s nothing wrong with using these words. The only people who are critiqued for using them are already low-status, and this critique helps maintain the low status of certain people and groups.

Read the whole post.

Previously: Alexandra D’Arcy on 800 years of “like”, teen girls as language distruptors, xkcd on quotative like and why linguists are hardcore.

malformalady:

Given the chance, butterflies will eat blood. Blood contains all manner of minerals and nutrients that are beneficial for most living organisms. It also contains a significant amount of sodium and glucose, two essential dietary blocks for most butterflies. Both of these are also found in fruit. It also contains a significant amount of sodium and glucose, two essential dietary blocks for most butterflies. Both of these are also found in fruit.

blue-mug:

In my linguistics class we were talking about “insertion” which is basically when you say a word and pronounce an extra letter or sound even though it’s not written in the word itself, to which my professor used the example of “hamster” because when you say it you pronounce a “p” even though it’s not written and this group of guys were going through an existential crisis because they couldn’t believe they said hamster with a “p” and one kid began to question everything in his life and it was beautiful

My favourite example along these lines is the hidden nasal sounds in English that you don’t even realize you’re producing. Everyone knows about /m/ and /n/ because they have distinct letters, but there’s also a sound that’s often written “ng” and yet not actually pronounced as n+g. For example, “ng” in “finger” is pronounced like “n+g” but “ng” in “singer” is a totally distinct sound (known as “engma” and written /ŋ/ in the IPA). 

Even more obscurely, /m/ is normally produced with a closure of the two lips, but when it’s found before /f/ or /v/, it gets pronounced with the teeth on the lips instead, just like /f/ and /v/ are, as in “comfort” or “symphony”. The IPA symbol for this is /ɱ/, and I don’t think it technically has a fun name, but I call it “emfma” by analogy with “engma” and every linguist I’ve said it to has understood me.

pochowek:

beaky-peartree:

remember when lol meant “laughing out loud” instead of “this is to indicate that this brief text isn’t hostile”

remember when lol meant “this brief text isn’t hostile” instead of “this brief text is in fact horrendously hostile and very passive aggressive”

There’s a linguistics paper about lol that explains both of these meanings!

Today in hard-hitting linguistics research, the linguist blogosphere has been investigating shitgibbon and related words. 

Ben Zimmer starts off on Strong Language with an investigation into the origin and history of shitgibbon: 

Leach’s “fascist, loofa-faced, shit-gibbon” was clearly inspired by MetalOllie’s “Cheeto-faced, ferret wearing shitgibbon” (which proved so popular you can even buy it on a mug). Shitgibbon has a lot going for it, with the same punchy meter as other Trumpian epithets popularized last summer like cockwomble, fucknugget, and jizztrumpet. (Metrically speaking, these words are compounds consisting of one element with a single stressed syllable and a second disyllabic element with a trochaic pattern, i.e., stressed-unstressed. As a metrical foot in poetry, the whole stressed-stressed-unstressed pattern is known as antibacchius.)

But shitgibbon didn’t originate with MetalOllie. Its early history has been traced by Hugo van Kemenade, a resourceful word researcher whose biggest claim to fame is finding the earliest known use of the word selfie in a 2002 Australian forum post. (He goes by @hugovk on Twitter and just “Hugo” elsewhere.) As Hugo shared on English Language & Usage Stack Exchange and Wiktionary, shitgibbon can be found all the way back in 2000 on music-related Usenet newsgroups.

EvilJam32, 21 Mar 2000, alt.music.tragically-hip
Good luck and goodbye to the most sick-making, hypocritical bunch of shitgibbons i’ve yet encountered on the Web!

Later, Ben confirms the origin of shitgibbon: 

Breaking news! I’ve confirmed that the originator of “shitgibbon” is none other than David Quantick, writing for @NME in the late ‘80s.

Taylor Jones then takes us into what kinds of words can be variants of “shitgibbon”:

So, it’s not the fact of being a gibbon per se. Various other monkeys would work: vervet, mandrill, etc. However, crucially, baboons, macaques, black howlers, and pygmy marmosets are out.

Moreover, it’s not completely unlimited. Some words fit but don’t make much sense as an insult: cock bookshelf, fart saucepan (which I quite like, actually), dick pension, belch welder.

Others sound like the kind of thing a child would say: fart person! poop human! turd foreman!

Yet others are too Shakespearean: fart monger! piss weasel!

Clearly some words (waffle, weasel, gibbon, pimple, bucket) are better than others (bookshelf, doctor, ninja, icebox), and some just depend on delivery (e.g., ironic twat hero, turd ruler, spunk monarch, dick duchess).

For a while, I’ve been discussing vowels in insults with fellow linguist Lauren Spradlin. Note that when we talk about vowels, we mean sounds, not letters. Don’t worry about the spelling, try saying the below aloud. Spradlin has brought my attention to the importance of repeating vowels increasing the viability of a new insult of this form: crap rabbit, jizz biscuit, shit piston, spunk puffin, cock waffle, etc.

I would argue that having the right vowels actually gives you some leeway, so you can get away with following the first word with — gasp! —- a non-trochee! Be it an iamb (remember iambic pentameter?) as in douche-canoe, spluge caboose, or the delightfully British bunglecunt (h/t Jeff Lidz), or even more syllables: Kobey Schwayder’s charming mofo-bonobo.

Contrary to what Taylor has, I think “douchebaboon” would actually work just fine, for the same vowel-matching reason that “douchecanoe” works. (But “shitbaboon” and “shitcanoe” are both pretty bad, I agree.)

But unless the second word has a matching vowel (in which case all bets are off), I think we can systematically predict which trochees are going to be okay. Let’s group them and have a look. 

The good ones include: waffle, weasel, gibbon, pimple, bucket, biscuit, rabbit, piston, puffin, basket, whistle, helmet, blanket, mandrill, gopher, weevil, nugget, trumpet. 

And the not-so-great ones include: bookshelf, saucepan, doctor, ninja, icebox. 

Phonological constraints: trochee, CVCVC (+further optional consonants)

The good ones all seem to begin and end with a consonant (unlike ninja – and I’d argue that kitty, pizza, zombie, banjo, ascot, ankle, emu, inkhorn, office are equally bad). Extra consonants are okay in any position (lobster, blanket, vortex), but you need at least one in each. The only counter-example I’ve found here is “monkey”.

As I’ve been constructing examples, I’ve also been noticing that while assonance makes the compound really good (see douchecanoe), consonance seems to make it worse: I avoided pisspirate, fartfreedom, shitscholar. But perhaps this is a matter of taste – I can imagine someone liking pisspuffin or wankweasel. 

Morphological constraint: monomorphemic

The good examples are also all monomorphemic, at least to current English speakers. For example, “gibbon” isn’t gibb+on, and even though -et might once have been added to helm-, blank-, buck-, this is no longer transparent to English speakers. On the other hand, many of the rejected words are transparently composed of parts: book-shelf, sauce-pan, ice-box. 

Indeed, I can’t seem to find any compound that really works (jetpack, doorway, keyboard), although there are are lot of compounds in English and I certainly haven’t tried all of them. I wonder if this is some constraint against creating a (one-time, nonliteral) compound out of a word that’s already compounded. English is happy to entertain stacked transparent compounds (bathroom towel rack screw holder) but might have a harder time if the whole is supposed to be opaque. Counterexamples welcome here. 

Semantic constraint: non-human

That leaves us with “doctor”. It’s dubiously morphologically transparent: English speakers probably recognize -or from words like “actor”, but “doct” isn’t an English word by itself. But I think that’s a red herring – I’d argue that the important part here is that doctor already refers to a human (or human-like) entity. There’s something similarly weird about shitdentist, shitdemon, turdscholar, fartbarber, shitpirate, douchelawyer, and so on. 

There are two possible reasons that I can see for this constraint. One is confusion – if you call someone a shitdentist, do you mean that they’re a shitty dentist or a generically bad human being? Whereas if you call someone a shitweasel, they’re clearly not actually a weasel, so you must just be insulting them. To this end, the generic titles (shitmaster, turd duchess) seem to work better than specific professions, because we already have a tradition of ironically calling people titles, while we don’t have a tradition of ironically calling people doctors, lawyers, or other professions. 

But secondly, having your second word be an animal or an inanimate object dehumanizes the target of your insult, which is more insulting – as Taylor notes, the swear+title forms are probably ironic. [Update: it’s not that you can’t say, for example, assmaster or cockdoctor. It’s just that in the right context, they’re practically compliments.]

Abstract and mass nouns are also pretty weird for the opposite reason, because they’re hard to associate with a human at all (shitweather, shitlanguage, turdmonday, shitfreedom).

At any rate, since this now seems to be an active area of linguistics research, I think we need a name for this construction. I’m going to propose “shitgibbon compounds”. 

Linguists in the #ActualLivingScientist hashtag on twitter.

I don’t know how many people habitually read my blog anymore who don’t also follow me on twitter, but if you’re not on social media– I’m running an itch.io jam in February, and you should participate!

The jam is called “Utopia Jam,” and it’s for games which take place in or help imagine better worlds. Check out the jam page for more information about the subject matter.

For inspiration, we’ve cited artistic subcultures, books, movies, and TV shows which take place in optimistic futures. Star Trek, the Culture series, Solarpunk art, and Ursula LeGuin’s blurry “Hainish Cycle” are all examples of optimistic futurism.

I’m running this jam with Cat Manning and we’re going to be making a game for it together. So far, over 50 people have expressed interest in participating through itch.io, so it seems like the right jam at the right time.

Ok, technically, it's on the 22nd which is Sunday. Any letters mailed on Monday the 23rd will need to have our old friend of 49 cents affixed. There is NO price change for postcards, international mail or for additional ounces for letters. Here's a handy chart:

It's not so bad! I just don't see why they had to jump down to 47 only to pop back up to 49. Yes, there are rules, but sometimes I think the government could really benefit from some common sense.

-Donovan

A post about doing natural language processing on fanfic, by Smitha Milli at the Organization for Transformative Works blog. Excerpt: 

The goal of this work was to share what fanfiction has to offer to the fields of natural language processing, computational social science, and digital humanities. Towards this end, we collected a large dataset of fanfiction from fanfiction.net that consists of about 6 million stories written by around 1 million authors. To characterize the interaction between authors and readers, we analyzed the network structure of the community. We found that 52% of the authors in our dataset had reviewed another author’s story. Of these authors, each had reviewed on average 13 other stories. We did exploratory data analysis to investigate the content of these reviews. In particular, we ran a statistical model called “latent dirichlet allocation” to extract the different topics underlying the reviews. Probably unsurprising to most of you, most of the reviews consisted of positive author encouragement (“please update!!!”) or emotional reactions to the story (“aww cute”).

We also investigated differences between fanfiction and canon. Specifically, we compared ten canons present in the Gutenberg corpus to their fanfiction counterparts. (We used canons from Gutenberg, so that we would have access to the text of the original stories. The canons we looked at were Les Miserables, Sherlock Holmes, Pride and Prejudice, Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, Anne of Green Gables, Jane Eyre, Little Women, The Scarlet Pimpernel, and the Secret Garden).

In both fanfiction and canon we found that female characters were mentioned less frequently than male characters. However, we did find that fanfiction had a slight, but very statistically significant, increase in the frequency of female character mentions. In fanfiction 42.4% of character mentions were female, while in the canons 40.1% of character mentions were female. We also analyzed how the number of times specific characters were mentioned differs between canon and fanfiction. For example, in Pride and Prejudice fanfiction, Mr. Darcy receives a large increase in mentions, while nearly every other character drops in the amount that they’re mentioned.

Read the whole post or the full paper (pdf)

This is a more data-driven version of the previous discussion on the phrase “toeing out of his shoes” in fanfic and may also be relevant to the character-based fanfiction stats found @toastystats by @destinationtoast.

A lovely tutorial on the Paper and Ink Arts blog by Jillian Kaye on how to make your envelope look like a holiday sweater. It's great how such simple marks can combine to make an intricate design. How's your holiday mail art going? Share some links with us if you've got pictures!

Who would have believed that the perfect Wikipedia photo caption could have been improved on? (Alan Ferrier on twitter)

I love this as an example of Gricean humour. Grice’s Maxims say to only say things that are relevant (i.e. interpret everything someone says as if it adds relevant information to the conversation). In this case, the caption is “improved” by adding (right) after the name of the bagpiper. In many photo captions, (left) or (right) is used to tell us which of several similar-looking people the caption is about. If there were several bagpipers or even humans, (right) would be a neutral, informative information. 

But here, the only entities in the photo are Piper Kerr and the indifferent penguin. It’s very easy to tell the difference between them. So adding (right) brings with it the absurd interpretation that (right) is relevant information, i.e. that the piper and the penguin are hard to tell apart.