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13 Feb 20:59

"Hemingway" on Hemingway

by Mark Liberman

Several people have written to me about the so-called "Hemingway" app, which offers to give you detailed stylistic advice about your writing.  One useful way to evaluate programs of this kind is to see what they do with good writing — and given this effort's name, it makes sense to check out its opinion about the prose of Ernest Hemingway.

Here's the first paragraph of Hemingway's 1923 story My Old Man:

I guess looking at it now my old man was cut out for a fat guy, one of those regular little roly fat guys you see around, but he sure never got that way, except a little toward the last, and then it wasn't his fault, he was riding over the jumps only and he could afford to carry plenty of weight then. I remember the way he'd pull on a rubber shirt over a couple of jerseys and a big sweat shirt over that, and get me to run with him in the forenoon in the hot sun. He'd have, maybe, taken a trial trip with one of Razzo's skins early in the morning after just getting in from Torino at four o'clock in the morning and beating it out to the stables in a cab and then with the dew all over everything and the sun just starting to get going, I'd help him pull off his boots and he'd get into a pair of sneakers and all these sweaters and we'd start out.

Pseudo-Hemingway's evaluation: "Bad". The alleged problems:

1 of 3 sentences are hard to read.
2 of 3 sentences are very hard to read.
1 adverbs. Aim for 0 or fewer.

Here's the start of The Snows of Kilimanjaro (minus some dialogue):

The cot the man lay on was in the wide shade of a mimosa tree and as he looked out past the shade onto the glare of the plain there were three of the big birds squatted obscenely, while in the sky a dozen more sailed, making quick-moving shadows as they passed.

He lay then and was quiet for a while and looked across the heat shimmer of the plain to the edge of the bush. There were a few Tommies that showed minute and white against the yellow and, far off, he saw a herd of zebra, white against the green of the bush. This was a pleasant camp under big trees against a hill, with good water, and close by, a nearly dry water hole where sand grouse flighted in the mornings.

Pseudo-Hemingway's evaluation: "OK". The problems:

 2 of 4 sentences are hard to read.
1 of 4 sentences are very hard to read.
2 adverbs. Aim for 1 or fewer.

A paragraph from a bit later in the same work:

That was the day he'd first seen dead men wearing white ballet skirts and upturned shoes with pompons on them. The Turks had come steadily and lumpily and he had seen the skirted men running and the of ficers shooting into them and running then themselves and he and the British observer had run too until his lungs ached and his mouth was full of the taste of pennies and they stopped behind some rocks and there were the Turks coming as lumpily as ever. Later he had seen the things that he could never think of and later still he had seen much worse. So when he got back to Paris that time he could not talk about it or stand to have it mentioned. And there in the cafe as he passed was that American poet with a pile of saucers in front of him and a stupid look on his potato face talking about the Dada movement with a Roumanian who said his name was Tristan Tzara, who always wore a monocle and had a headache, and, back at the apartment with his wife that now he loved again, the quarrel all over, the madness all over, glad to be home, the office sent his mail up to the flat. So then the letter in answer to the one he'd written came in on a platter one morning and when he saw the hand writing he went cold all over and tried to slip the letter underneath another. But his wife said, "Who is that letter from, dear?" and that was the end of the beginning of that.

Pseudo-Hemingway's evaluation: "Bad". The problems:

3 of 7 sentences are very hard to read.
3 adverbs. Aim for 0 or fewer.

The start of For Whom the Bell Tolls (again minus the dialogue):

He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees. The mountainside sloped gently where he lay; but below it was steep and he could see the dark of the oiled road winding through the pass. There was a stream alongside the road and far down the pass he saw a mill beside the stream and the falling water of the dam, white in the summer sunlight.

He spread the photostated military map out on the forest floor and looked at it carefully. The old man looked over his shoulder. He was a short and solid old man in a black peasant’s smock and gray iron-stiff trousers and he wore rope-soled shoes. He was breathing heavily from the climb and his hand rested on one of the two heavy packs they had been carrying.

Bending under the weight of the packs, sweating, they climbed steadily in the pine forest that covered the mountainside. There was no trail that the young man could see, but they were working up and around the face of the mountain and now they crossed a small stream and the old man went steadily on ahead up the edge of the rocky stream bed. The climbing now was steeper and more difficult, until finally the stream seemed to drop down over the edge of a smooth granite ledge that rose above them and the old man waited at the foot of the ledge for the young man to come up to him.

Pseudo-Hemingway's evaluation: "OK". The problems:

3 of 10 sentences are hard to read.
2 of 10 sentences are very hard to read.
5 adverbs. Aim for 1 or fewer.

The first paragraph of The Old Man and the Sea:

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy's parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week. It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast. The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked the the flag of permanent defeat.

Pseudo-Hemingway's evaluation: "OK". The problems:

2 of five sentences are very hard to read.
2 uses of passive voice. Aim for 1 or fewer.

So a clear verdict is emerging: Ernest Hemingway was a poor to fair writer, whose writing is hard to read and who generally uses too many adverbs.

He's in good ("bad"?) company. The first two paragraphs of The Great Gatsby are rated "Bad" ("3 of 8 sentences are hard to read. 3 of 8 sentences are very hard to read. 6 adverbs. Aim for 1 or fewer.") The first paragraph of To the Lighthouse is rated "Bad" ("3 of 4 sentences are very hard to read. 5 adverbs. Aim for 1 or fewer. 2 uses of passive voice. Aim for 1 or fewer.") The first three sentences of the Declaration of Independence are rated "Bad"  ("3 of 3 sentences are very hard to read. 2 words or phrases can be simpler. 3 uses of passive voice. Aim for 1 or fewer.")

I could go on, but I think this is enough.

Update — It's worth noting that the "readability" index depends on word frequency (or maybe just word length?) as well as sentence length. Thus this document, though "Good":

is not quite as readable as this one:

Of course, neither one got dinged for too many passives or too many adverbs (since apparently to count as an adverb, a word in -ly needs to have another attested word as the pre-ly base…

And to understand this next one, you need to be in the 26th grade, which according to my calculations means four years of college (=16th grade), six years of grad school (=22nd grade), two years of post-doc (=24th grade), and then I'm not sure, two more years of kindergarten or something:

… OK, turns out it's just word length, not word frequency:

10 Feb 11:57

Unlocked iPhones, the New International Currency

by John Gruber
Mahayana

Tô aceitando quem me mande umas calças levi's aqui, pois é impossível achar calça boa por um preço decente aqui no bananão #cms

Vernon Silver, writing for Businessweek:

I’ve been paying my bills with iPhones. Not with apps or on bank sites — I’ve been using the Apple hardware as currency.

It started by accident in December, during a business trip to New York. I live in Rome, where domestic work comes cheap and technology is expensive. An unlocked, gold, 32-gigabyte iPhone 5s that costs about $815 with tax in the U.S. goes for €839 (about $1,130) in Italy, roughly a month’s wages for workers who do laundry, pick up kids from school, or provide care for the elderly. When one worker heard I was visiting the States, she asked me to pick her up an iPhone in lieu of the equivalent cash for work she’d done. Lining up inside the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue, I was surrounded by shoppers speaking languages from around the world. The salesman looked stunned when I said I wanted an unlocked iPhone. Just one?

08 Feb 10:46

Ice cream in the ass.

by Mark Liberman

Among the visual jokes coming out of Russia on the occasion of the Sochi Olympics are some intriguing menu items:

Sochi menu. Not a joke. pic.twitter.com/OAnXN9h5rk

— Eugene Gourevitch (@gourev) February 5, 2014

This is a natural consequence of some simple but treacherous facts about Russian and English:

мороженое в асс. is word-for-word "ice cream in ass.", short for мороженое в ассортименте, i.e. "ice cream in assortment", i.e. "assorted ice cream".

But where does the "the" come from?

Russian, like most other Slavic languages, has no articles; and so deciding where to put articles in English is a source of great puzzlement to native speakers of such languages.

Most of the jokes about Russians and articles involve leaving them out, as in the joke about the first lecture of Russian class for English speakers: "I start with good news! In English language, is necessary to use article! But in Russian language, no article!"

Hypercorrection can happen here as well. Sometimes, knowing that in English article ("the article"? "an article"?) is often necessary, and despairing of any more logical method, Russians will put some in more or less at random, as a sort of statistical approximation to English nominal morphosyntax.

Update — Apparently the menu picture (though genuine) is a couple of years old, and probably not from Sochi

Update #2 — Barbara Partee reminds me of the discussion about English grammar in which a famous linguist of Slavic background famously exclaimed "No, no, in English, noun ALWAYS takes article!"

I've heard versions of this story from several sources, about several different famous-linguists-of-Slavic-background, so I think it belongs in the "too good to check" category.

07 Feb 10:37

New Command Line YouTube Player And Downloader With Local Playlists Support: mps-youtube

by noreply@blogger.com (Andrew)
youtube-dl is probably the most popular command line YouTube (and not only) downloader for Linux but there's a new tool that tries to do things a bit differently.


mps-youtube is a new tool which, besides being able to download YouTube videos (either the whole video or just the audio), can also search and play YouTube videos and create local playlists, all from the command line.

By default, this is basically a YouTube audio player (and downloader), but you can enable (external) video playback from its options.

The tool uses mplayer for streaming but it can also use mpv, a relatively new mplayer fork.

Update: the tool was initially called "pms-youtube" but that was quite an unfortunate name :) so the tool was renamed to mps-youtube.


Installation


1. mps-youtube can be installed using pip. To Install pip in Ubuntu, use the following command:
sudo apt-get install python-pip

2. Then install mps-youtube using pip:
sudo pip install mps-youtube

3. You'll also need mplayer, which you can install using the following command:
sudo apt-get install mplayer

Later on, if you want to upgrade mps-youtube, use this command:
sudo pip install mps-youtube --upgrade

Arch Linux users can install mps-youtube via AUR.

If you want to use this with MPV, you can install it in Ubuntu (Saucy and Trusty) by using THIS PPA.

mpsyt is also available for Windows and Mac OS X. See its GitHub page for installation instructions.


Usage


To run mps-youtube, use the following command:
mpsyt

To search for a video on YouTube, prefix your search with either "." or "/".

Example: to search for "pantera", use:
.pantera
Then, to play an item from the search results, enter its number. You can also use combinations, for instance use "1,2,3" to play items 1, 2 and 3, or "1-5" to play items 1 to 5. You can also use "shuffle" or "repeat" along with the track numbers, for example "shuffle 1-4".

To download an item, use:
d ITEM-NUMBER
for example, to download the 3rd search result, use "d 3".

By default, mps-youtube will only play (and download) the audio. To view (and optionally to download) the video instead, use this command:
set show_video true

By default, the tool uses mpv if found and if it's not installed, it uses mplayer. If you want to switch to mplayer, use this commands:
set player mplayer

To switch to mpv, use these commands:
set player mpv

You can find out all the available commands by simply entering "h":
Note: More documentation is available 
at https://github.com/np1/mps-youtube

Searching
You can enter a search term to search whenever the program is
expecting text input. Searches must be prefixed with either
a . or / character.

When a list of items is displayed, you can use the following
commands:

Downloading
d 3 to download item 3

Selecting Items
all to play all
1 2 3 to play items 1 2 and 3
2-4 6 7-3 to play items 2 3 4 6 7 6 5 4 3
3-6 9-12 shuffle to play selected items in random order
3-6 9-12 repeat to play selected items continuously

Manipulating Items
rm 1 3 to remove items 1 and 3. Also use rm 1 2 5-7 to
remove a range
rm all to remove all items
sw 1 3 to swap the position of items 1 and 3
mv 1 3 to move items 1 to position 3

Playlist commands
add 1 2 5-7 to add items 1 2 5 6 and 7 to the current playlist.
add 1 2 3 <playlist_name> to add items 1,2,3 to a saved
playlist. A new playlist will be created if the given name
doesn't already exist.
vp to view the current playlist (then use rm, mv and sw to
modify it)
ls to list your saved playlists
open <playlist_name or ID> to open a saved playlist as
the current playlist
view <playlist name or ID> to view a playlist (leaves
current playlist intact)
play <playlist name or ID> to play a saved playlist
directly
save or save <playlist_name> to save the currently
displayed items as a stored playlist on disk
mv <old_name or ID> <new_name> to rename a playlist
rmp <playlist_name or ID> to delete a playlist from disk

q to quit
06 Feb 19:24

Netflu pedindo para o time ser zoado

by Bruno Santos

Sabe aquele amiguinho que ia pra escola com a calça furada na bunda, era zoado por isso e depois chorava? A galera da zoeira sempre falava “Mas cara, vindo com essa roupa você ESTÁ PEDINDO PRA SER ZOADO”. Pois bem, essa é a situação do site NetFlu.

Os caras lançaram uma promoção com o título “Defenda o Fluminense das injustiças e concorra a prêmios”. Sim, estão pedindo para serem zoados.

Do NetFlu vem as frases abaixo:

Cansado das injustiças que parte da imprensa e alguns rivais fazem com o Fluminense no caso Héverton? Que tal responder à altura estas críticas de forma criativa, bem humorada e ainda ter a chance de ganhar prêmios?

NETFLU promove um Concurso Cultural, que premiará torcedores com frases criativas contra os absurdos que se lê, vê e ouve em veículos de comunicação e nas redes sociais sobre todo o imbróglio.

1615142_571900879553394_90122223_n1

Sério, parem de dar munição para serem zoados. Os “absurdos” que a imprensa e adversários falam sobre o time e a situação atual é porque vocês sempre estão sendo beneficiados nos tribunais. Aliás, como descobrimos, a expressão “tapetão” foi cunhada após mais uma “vitória” do Fluminense nos tribunais, como vocês podem ver clicando aqui. E vejam só, foram beneficiados com uma ação na JUSTIÇA COMUM.

Não satisfeitos, mandaram advogado para um julgamento onde vocês teoricamente não tinham nada a ver com isso. Entraram como terceira parte por qual motivo? E agora não querem ser zoados?

A única coisa que tenho a dizer é:

Flumimense, PAGUE A SÉRIE B. Quer dizer, A(S) SÉRIE(S) B, já que estão acumulando um monte pelo caminho.

PS 1: O prêmio pro vencedor é aquela camisa laranja horrorosa. De acordo com o naipe do concurso.

PS 2: Não, não vai ter link pro NetFlu aqui.

05 Feb 22:24

A Única Pessoa Condenada Pelas Jornadas de Junho

by Matias Maxx

Rafael Braga Vieira fez 26 anos dia 31 de janeiro. Nascido e criado na Vila da Penha, no Rio de Janeiro, trabalhava como garimpeiro urbano, coletando antiguidades e objetos usados no lixo para vender no “Dingo Mall” como é conhecida a feira de coisas usadas montada por moradores de rua nas proximidades da feira de antiguidades da Praça XV. No dia 20 de Junho de 2013, a PM carioca utilizou cavalaria, Tropa de Choque, muitas bombas e o famigerado Caveirão contra as centenas de milhares de pessoas que se manifestavam contra o aumento das passagens em frente à prefeitura. Enquanto alguns resistiam com escudos e barricadas, impedindo o avanço da tropa, vários manifestantes se espalharam pelo centro ateando fogo em lixo e quebrando vidraças de bancos. Por volta das 18h, Rafael, que diz nunca ter participado de manifestação nenhuma, voltava de seu garimpo para um sobrado abandonado onde ele morava. Ele declara que lá encontrou duas garrafas de produtos de limpeza que pretendia levar para uma tia, quando foi abordado por PMs e conduzido à delegacia, onde as garrafas se transformaram em coquetéis molotovs.

Rafael foi condenado no estatuto do desarmamento, por posse de explosivos e cumpre a pena de cinco anos no Presídio Elisabeth Sá Rego, também conhecido como Bangu 5. Trata-se de uma penitenciária de regime fechado, destinada normalmente a condenados ligados à facção criminosa Comando Vermelho, que controla a comunidade onde Rafael foi criado. Mesmo sem envolvimento com o crime organizado, o fato de ser cria de uma comunidade dominada por uma facção rival costuma ser uma sentença de morte no sistema prisional do Rio de Janeiro. Acompanhado de agentes e da assessoria de imprensa da SEAP, conversei por vinte minutos com Rafael. Com fala mansa e um triste conformismo, ele me contou a história da única pessoa condenada após ser presa nos protestos que tomaram conta do país desde junho do ano passado.

VICE: Me conta, o que aconteceu no dia 20 de Junho?
Rafael Braga Vieira: 
Tinha manifestação no centro, e eu estava chegando do trabalho e fui para o casarão onde eu morava. Quando eu saí, os PMs já me abordaram e falaram que eu estava com coquetel molotov na mão, mas eu não tava com coquetel molotov nenhum... Era uma garrafa de Pinho Sol que achei quando eu cheguei no casarão. Lá é aberto, é um casarão que foi invadido, na hora que eu cheguei lá, tinha essa garrafa e uma daquelas garrafas verdes de cloro... Aí pegaram a garrafa de Pinho Sol e esvaziaram, botaram lá algo que eu acho que era gasolina, amarraram um paninho e falaram que era coquetel molotov perante ao juiz. Só isso...

Você morava nesse casarão?
Eu morava sozinho nesse casarão aberto que tem na Lapa, dormia lá. Sou camelô, trabalho na feira da Praça XV. Como eu não tinha lugar para guardar minhas coisas, guardava lá. Minhas peças usadas. Trabalho com peças usadas, peças raras, não tenho nada a ver com essa manifestação aí. Nunca participei, nunca vi...

Você foi assistido por algum advogado quando foi preso?
Quando fui preso vieram dois advogados que me acompanharam, assinei até um papel lá com eles... Foram até lá na casa da minha família...  Mas só isso mesmo... Não sei se tão acompanhando ainda, não pediram dinheiro... Lá no juiz eu tava com a Defensoria Pública...

E você viu os PMs esvaziando a garrafa?
As duas garrafas estavam lacradas quando eu peguei, não era molotov não. Peguei porque tem uma tia minha que mora lá no outro casarão do lado desse onde eu moro, eu ia dar pra ela. Aí eles me abordaram na saída do casarão, que fica de frente à delegacia das crianças lá na Lapa. Nem tinha visto eles quando eu saí, estava carregando as garrafas na mão, já chegaram me agredindo já, me deixaram no portão e seguraram as garrafas. Me levaram lá pra 5ª [DP], e lá as garrafas já estavam com gasolina. Eles esvaziaram e colocaram gasolina pra dizer que era coquetel molotov, mas isso não tem nada a ver não. Falaram isso pro juiz e ele foi e me condenou sei lá por quê, acho que é porque eu já tenho passagens.

Quais foram essas passagens?
Cheguei a ser condenado já em outras passagens por roubo. Cumpri pena e saí por ordem do juiz, saí de condicional e eu tava trabalhando tranquilão na paz de Deus, aí aconteceu isso aí.

E em quais presídios você passou antes de chegar aqui em Bangu 5?
Primeiro eu fui pra Japeri, depois pro setor B e ai me mandaram pra cá. Me mandaram pra cá. Eu tô aqui mesmo porque eu sou morador da comunidade da Penha, desde pequeno, minha família é de lá... Aí me botaram aqui.  O convívio é tranquilo, tranquilão... Mas não tenho recebido visita, porque aqui fica um pouquinho distante pra eles.

Você acha que foi preso injustamente?
Fui preso injustamente com certeza, é porque eu tive duas passagens, por isso aí... Eu não fiz nada, sou inocente de verdade. Mas já fui condenado mesmo, o juiz me condenou, cinco anos... Tô pagando...

E o que você pretende fazer quando sair?
Quando sair pretendo voltar a trabalhar mesmo, resolver minha vida, arrumar um trabalho de carteira assinada que é melhor, ajudar minha família. Eu que ajudo minha família em casa, o mais velho dos irmãos sou eu. Minha mãe não tem marido. Tá morando sozinha agora, comigo somos sete irmãos e eu que ajudava.

E agora? Como eles estão se virando?
Pô! Não tenho nem notícias. Não sei como o pessoal tá se virando aí.

Me conta mais sobre seu trabalho na Praça XV.
Trabalho lá há muito tempo, desde os treze anos de idade. Vendo peças usadas que acho no garimpo, sou garimpeiro. Vou juntando lá no casarão, levo pra feira, espalho lá e começo a vender, pra arrumar dinheiro. Tudo que eu acho, liquidificador, televisão, aí eu alugo uma barraca lá e armo. É maneiro. Televisão funcionando, coisas boas que eu acho no lixo... Tudo vende lá cara, até peça ruim vende lá (risos), os caras compram pra tirar alguma coisa. Pô! Porcelana! Porcelana dá dinheiro legal, jarrinhos, quadros antigos, molduras... Eu tirava um dinheiro lá, de 300 a 500 por semana. Dava pra ajudar minha família tranquilo...

Eu ficava três semanas ali por baixo, ia pra casa lá na Penha, ficava uma semana em casa... Acabava ficando mais tempo lá embaixo do que em casa. Só ia lá em casa mesmo pra levar um dinheiro pra minha família, tô com duas irmãs recém-nascidas. Minha mãe chegou até a trabalhar comigo lá, mas não tava dando mais não...

Você já tinha participado de alguma manifestação? Ou sabe o porquê dessas manifestações?
Na manifestação anterior eu nem tava por perto. Nem sei por que estavam rolando essas manifestações. Não sei de nada, eu tava só voltando do trabalho, vi aquele monte de gente e aí isso aconteceu do nada. Tava vindo do Largo do Machado, eu garimpo lá, em Laranjeiras. Foi eu chegar e aconteceu isso comigo, mais ou menos umas seis horas da tarde.

Quatro meses depois, quase 200 pessoas foram presas numa manifestação, chegaram a passar um tempo aqui em Bangu, mas já foram todos liberados. Por que você acha que é o único que foi condenado e continua preso?
É... Só eu... É porque eu já fui condenado antes por roubo. Realmente, estava roubando, mas parei com isso, não quero mais saber de roubo, nem de mais nada dessa vida. Estava trabalhando tranquilão na rua, tô voltando do trabalho aí o cara pega, me agride. E acho que porque eles me agrediram lá na frente de um monte de pessoas eles tiveram que esvaziar aquilo ali e dizer que era molotov. Já tinham me agredido, já foram me chamando, falando que eu tava no meio...  “Você tava ali né? No meio daquela bagunça ali né?”, tava nada. Falaram  pro juiz que já tinham me visto por lá, que tinham me visto com uma mochila, realmente eu andava todo dia com mochila, vindo do meu garimpo, várias bolsas só com as peças usadas que eu achava no lixo. Eles falaram pro juiz que eu andava com bolsas. Pô! Nada a ver! Forjado. Foi tudo forjado.

Então você acha que eles inventaram essa história na delegacia para justificar o abuso de autoridade que tinham cometido antes?
Isso! Eles chegaram me agredindo à pampa, me deram coronhada, bateram minha cabeça na parede da delegacia. Tinha um montão de policial lá mesmo, dois já me levaram lá pra dentro já me metendo a porrada, chegaram lá dentro acabaram de me arrebentar e colocaram no “porquinho”, me deixaram um tempão lá e depois me chamaram, “tua casa caiu, não sei o quê...”. Aí me levaram pra 5ª e apresentaram a garrafa de Pinho Sol já com gasolina e com um pano na garrafa. Só isso mesmo. Falaram que era molotov, eu falei que não era. Mas não tava ninguém comigo, eu tava sozinho. Mas um montão de gente que tava com molotov mesmo foi tudo embora. Tudo liberado. Eu não tava com nada disso não e fui condenado.

Siga o Matias Maxx no Twitter.

05 Feb 00:55

Affix dinners

by Mark Liberman

Francois Lang wonders "Will this restaurant offer a Suffix Dinner next week?

And after the exotic Infix Lunch and the justly famous Clitic Breakfast, there are many other possible Morphosyntactic Menus: the the Suppletion Special, the Allomorph Aperitif, the Conjugation Collation,  …

 

03 Feb 11:19

The Tenure Code

by Ilan Stavans
Mahayana

"Amherst College, like other institutions at the top of the food chain, sees itself as superior. It wants only top students, top faculty, and top administrators. But what does “top” imply? Do we get top people or do we make them? "

At Amherst College, where I’ve taught for more 20 years (oy, gevalt!), a couple of years ago a tenure case was brought down in part because of the word “solid.” I’ve put it in quote marks in part because tenure cases are multiheaded monsters: Their rise or fall as a result of countless factors. In this particular one, one of the factors—and, ultimately, a stumbling block—was this much-contested word.

An outside reviewer had used it to describe a candidate’s publications record. It became a subject of debate among the Committee of Six and the department supporting the candidate.

Here I need to offer a quick crash course through the college’s hierarchical structure, or at least a portion of it. The Committee of Six, a judicial body of elected faculty whose job it is to legislate on a large number of issues, is in charge of reviewing tenure cases once the candidate’s department has offered its recommendations. For these cases, the C6 looks at, among other things, every student evaluation, every letter from peers, and every outside review with utmost dedication. In other words, it is a painful, meticulous process of what I call logocrasy: a Kafkaesque labyrinth of language. The president then endorses or rejects the C6 tenure recommendation.

“Solid,” a colleague with past experience in C6 affairs told me, is code for flaccid, uncooked. She added another no-no: strong. An institution of our statue, she said, only wants—only should want—the best, the brightest. In short, the brilliant.

But if everybody is brilliant, then nobody really is, for brilliance isn’t about norm. This, clearly, is a conundrum, for three reasons. Reason No. 1: Members of the C6 come from various fields, from the sciences to the humanities. Their capacity to judge candidates from fields other than their own in at least half the cases is based on good will, not on intimate knowledge of the discipline. Reason No. 2: To be elected to the C6 they must have spent about a decade making themselves known in the community, which in turn makes them electable. By this time, the demands for tenure have changed from when they went for tenure. So they often demand of a candidate’s record more—much more—than their own records are able to display. This means that by their own implausible standards they wouldn’t receive tenure themselves. And Reason No. 3: The drive for exceptionalism is a long and winding road.

Reason No. 3 concerns me the most. Amherst College, like other institutions at the top of the food chain, sees itself as superior. It wants only top students, top faculty, and top administrators. But what does “top” imply? Do we get top people or do we make them? Isn’t that what our mission is? By way of example, I know countless B and even C students whose originality is unsurpassed by their fellow A counterparts. Likewise with faculty: How does one become a strong teacher? Answer: talent + experience + DNA. As for administrators, I leave their qualifications to others with better discernment.

Exceptionalism at Amherst is such that the C6 expects—and the college community expects the C6 to expect—outside reviewers to use only exceptional language in tenure letters. If a candidate isn’t “superb,” “extraordinary,” “unparalleled,” “remarkable,” and “at the top of her field,” then the assessment is coded with mediocrity: Good isn’t good enough.

The rush for superlatives is distressing. Departmental letters for tenure are narratives as long as 15,000 words festered with adjectives as cartoonish as they are improbable. Outside letters follow the same fetish. The composite portrait isn’t of real-life people but of utopian characters. This exceptionalism, this sense that we are above the crowd, better even than our closest competitors, allows the C6, and the rest of us, to be proud of our aloofness, though it gets lonely at the top.

Do outside reviewers know about this tenure code? They do. Or, at the very least, they use the codes they’ve learned in the culture of their own institutions. For every institution has a code. Too bad these letters are confidential; otherwise someone could do a longitudinal analysis.

Personally, I get an average of between six and eight tenure-evaluation requests a semester. Such is the volume, let alone my other commitments, that I regularly decline, often to all, unless the candidate is a former student of mine, because each of these letters takes weeks to prepare: They involve attentive, meditative reading of the candidate’s dossier, comparison with equals in the field, and, more than anything else, a cavalier approach. One’s readership is minuscule, yet it has an outsized degree of power in its hands. Everyone knows the formula: Academics + power = mendacity.

I’m told that in some institutions, declining such invitations amounts to a rejection ending up in the candidate’s files. For that reason, I do what I most dislike but others have suggested as the pertinent approach: I don’t respond.

What I don’t know, where I’m in the dark (as other outside reviewers surely are, too), is in regards to particular institutional codes. Will “wonderful” be “sorrowful” at the University of Freedonia? Is “perfect” really “imperfect” at Yoknapatawpha College? I could blanket my letter with exceptional language but it would be a travesty: Things are what they are, not as we wish them to be.

By the way, I like teaching at an exceptional place. It’s rock solid, especially the students.

31 Jan 14:07

This tree branch is actually a camouflaged bird standing really still

by Casey Chan on Sploid, shared by Casey Chan to Gizmodo

This tree branch is actually a camouflaged bird standing really still

What are you looking at? Some trees, some leaves, a few branches and... a bird. You see, on top of that broken tree branch actually stands a completely still bird, the common potoo. It's hiding in plain sight and will stay that way even if predators are deathly close to them.

Read more...


    
31 Jan 14:06

History through the president’s words

by Nathan Yau

History through the Presidents Words

The Washington Post visualized the use of specific words throughout the years during State of the Union addresses.

Since 1900, there have been 116 State of the Union addresses, given by 20 presidents, with some presidents giving two addresses a year. Studying their choice of words, over time, provides glimpses of change in American politics—"communism" fades, "terrorism" increases—and evidence that some things never change ("America" comes up steadily, of course. As does "I.").

For some reason the interactive won't load for me now (It did yesterday.), but there's also a PDF version that you can download. Although the PDF only goes back to 1989 Bush, so try for the interactive version first. It was an interesting one. Update: Works again.

Can you believe it? We made it through an entire SOTU without a single word cloud. Come to think of it, I can't even remember the last time I saw one. I almost feel cheated.

28 Jan 22:35

The Standard American Diet viaslightlyirresponsible 

by joberholtzer
28 Jan 12:37

The evolution of SOTU pronouns

by Mark Liberman

Following up on Sunday's "SOTU evolution" post, here's a quick glance at changes over time in the relative frequency of some classes of pronouns in State of the Union messages. Over the course of the 20th century, there's been a clear upward trend in the frequency of first and second person pronouns:

(I've plotted the yearly rates as a magenta dotted line, and used a black solid line to show the results of a lowess() fit with f=0.15)

It's tempting to explain this graph in terms of the increasingly personalization of presidential politics, or something of the sort, but in fact there's a simpler and more concrete explanation for most of the effect. The reason for the abrupt rise in 1913, and for some of the subsequent variation, was a change in the basic communicative context. As Gerhard Peters explains,

Federalists Washington and Adams had personally addressed the Congress, but Jefferson was concerned that the practice of appearing before the representatives of the people was too similar to the British monarch's practice of addressing each new Parliament with a list of policy mandates, rather than "recommendations."

Jefferson's practice changed in 1913 with Woodrow Wilson. Wilson believed the presidency was more than a impersonal institution and active and visible presidential leadership was needed to the people and the Congress. As an expression of this philosophy, Wilson delivered oral messages to Congress, citing the authority of the Constitution.

For health reasons, Wilson did not address Congress in 1919 and 1920. Warren Harding's two messages (1921 and 1922) and Calvin Coolidge's first (1923) were also oral messages. Subsequently, Coolidge's remaining State of the Unions (1924-28) and all four of Hoover's (1929-32) were written.

Franklin D. Roosevelt consolidated the modern practice of delivering an oral State of the Union beginning with his first in 1934. Exceptions include Truman's 1st (1946) and last (1953), Eisenhower's last (1961), Carter's last (1981), and Nixon's 4th (1973 and 1974 when he submitted multiple documents entitled "State of the Union.").

A regression analysis would show us that there's still a modest temporal trend, beyond the simple difference between the style of written reports and the style of speeches. Presumably this does reflect an evolution in rhetorical style — or at least in the style of rhetoric considered appropriate to these formal occasions.

Whatever its causes, the change has been much greater in the case of first person plural pronouns than either first person singular or second person pronouns:

And if we amalgamate the SOTU addresses by president from FDR forwards, omitting the written messages and including only the ones delivered orally to Congress, we can see that Barack Obama's speechwriters have put him more or less in the middle of the pronominal pack:

This is unlikely to prevent cries of "narcissism!" or "royalty!" from the likes of George Will, Peggy Noonan, Charles Krauthammer, and Stanley Fish. But I present this bit of prophylaxis in the hope that ridicule may eventually succeed where reality has failed.

27 Jan 11:35

Damon Albarn intimista e com algumas canções novas para mostrar

by Lúcio Ribeiro
Mahayana

Damon <3<3

>>

250114_albarn

Espécie de Jack White inglês, o bamba Damon Blur Albarn – o homem de mil projetos que incluem uma banda eletrônica de personagens “animados” e uma ópera – vai lançar seu primeiro disco solo no fim de abril, dia 29, você leu na Popload.

O álbum, “Everyday Robots”, foi inspirado a partir da evolução tecnológica do mundo sob a ótica de Damon, baseando-se cronologicamente neste mundo desde sua infância até os dias atuais, buscando entender como as pessoas se relacionam entre elas e com a modernidade, com o telefone celular que faz tudo, com os jogos de computadores, enfim.

O primeiro single que dá título ao disco a gente já ouviu. Agora começam a aparecer algumas outras das 12 faixas que estarão no disco, filmadas durante uma apresentação recente de Damon dentro da programação do Sundance Film Festival, em Utah, que será transmitida posteriormente.

Uma fã filmou três destas canções inéditas: “You and Me”, “Hollow Ponds” e “Lonely, Press Play”. O show de caráter intimista teve Albarn ao violão, um tecladista e um quarteto de cordas formado por meninas. Dizem, Damon não puxou assunto durante a apresentação, que foi encerrada com a clássica “To The End”, do Blur.

>>

26 Jan 13:02

gemmacorrell: old, but always relevant.

by joberholtzer
Mahayana

escrita da tese



gemmacorrell:

old, but always relevant.

25 Jan 10:42

A Unifying Theory of Why Women Earn Less

by John List and Uri Gneezy
Mahayana

"Scholars have long theorized about the reasons why women haven’t made faster progress in breaking through the glass ceiling. Personally, we think that much of it boils down to this: men and women have different preferences for competitiveness, and at least part of the wage gaps we see are a result of men and women responding differently to incentives."

O que eu curto muito (só que não) no Freakonomics é que é tudo uma questão de "mulheres são assim e homens são assado, por isso o resultado é esse", como se o fator meramente biológico justificasse muita coisa. Perguntar pq mulher é menos competitiva? Pra quê? Dá trabalho.

John List and Uri Gneezy have appeared on our blog many times. This guest post is part a series adapted from their new book The Why Axis: Hidden Motives and the Undiscovered Economics of Everyday Life. List appeared in our recent podcast How to Raise Money Without Killing a Kitten.”

craigslist gender graphWhen it comes to the year 1991, history books will undoubtedly focus on the first Gulf War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but at least domestically, the biggest change was one you probably never heard about: 1991 was the first year that women overtook men in college attainment, a trend that has only gained steam since. Today 37.2% of women between the ages of 25 to 29 have a four-year college degree or higher versus just 29.8% for men.

Yet for all the academic achievement by women, men still earn a higher wage for equivalent jobs and continue to dominate the highest ranks of society. Senior management positions? Only one in five are held by women. Fortune 500 CEOs? Just 4% and fewer than 17% of the seats in Congress are held by women. 

Scholars have long theorized about the reasons why women haven’t made faster progress in breaking through the glass ceiling. Personally, we think that much of it boils down to this: men and women have different preferences for competitiveness, and at least part of the wage gaps we see are a result of men and women responding differently to incentives.

Being experimentalists, we understood that without actual evidence, this was just a conjecture. Determined to test our idea in the field we launched a large-scale field experiment on Craigslist where we posted ads for an administrative assistant gig we needed to fill. The experiment was conducted with Jeff Flory and Andreas Leibbrandt as coauthors.  We received responses from nearly 7,000 interested job seekers from cities all over the U.S. 

After a job seeker touched base with us, we gave them more details on the way they’d be compensated. Then we asked them to provide some basic information if they wanted to be considered for the position. Half the job seekers were told that the job paid a flat $15 per hour. The other half were told they would be paid $12 an hour but they would compete with a co-worker for a $6 per hour bonus (so that both ads would pay workers an average of $15 per hour).

What’d we find? Women were 70% less likely than men to go after the job if it had the competitive pay scale. This result accords with the broader insights from laboratory experiments that others—Muriel Niederle, Lise Vesterlund, Aldo Rustichini, etc.—have found.  Of course, this estimate doesn’t apply to every type of job and every type of person in the country, but it does underscore the fact that, when it comes to competition at a potential job, women aren’t always interested in leaning in.  

If you want to explore our world further, take the Why Axis Challenge: visit www.thewhyaxischallenge.com, post a photo of your copy of The Why Axis, and be entered to win prizes, including a meeting with Uri, John and Freakonomics author Steven Levitt! Be sure to stay tuned for more posts to come, which will give a glimpse into more ‘undiscovered economics.’

04 Jan 10:07

New York Film Academy’s study of gender inequality in the film...

by joberholtzer
03 Jan 23:28

privilege summed up in a rly cute little comic.





privilege summed up in a rly cute little comic.

02 Jan 12:54

2014

Some future reader, who may see the term, without knowing the history of it, may imagine that it had reference to some antiquated bridge of the immortal Poet, thrown across the silver Avon, to facilitate his escape after some marauding excursion in a neighbouring park; and in some Gentleman's Magazine of the next century, it is not impossible, but that future antiquaries may occupy page after page in discussing so interesting a matter. We think it right, therefore, to put it on record in the Oriental Herald that the 'Shakesperian Rope Bridges' are of much less classic origin; that Mr Colin Shakespear, who, besides his dignity as Postmaster, now signs himself 'Superintendent General of Shakesperian Rope Bridges', is a person of much less genius than the Bard of Avon. --The Oriental Herald, 1825
02 Jan 01:47

US Customs Destroys Virtuoso's Flutes Because They Were "Agricultural Items"

by samzenpus
McGruber writes "Flute virtuoso Boujemaa Razgui performed on a variety of flutes, each made by himself over years for specific types of ancient and modern performance. Razgui has performed with many U.S. ensembles and is a regular guest with the diverse and enterprising Boston Camerata. Last week, Razgui flew from Morocco to Boston, with stops in Madrid and New York. In New York, he says, a US Customs official opened his luggage and found the 13 flutelike instruments — 11 nays and two kawalas. Razgui says he had made all of the instruments using hard-to-find reeds. 'They said this is an agriculture item,' said Razgui, who was not present when his bag was opened. 'I fly with them in and out all the time and this is the first time there has been a problem. This is my life.' When his baggage arrived in Boston, the instruments were gone. He was instead given a number to call. 'They told me they were destroyed,' he says. 'Nobody talked to me. They said I have to write a letter to the Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C. This is horrible. I don't know what to do. I've never written letters to people.'"
26 Dec 12:29

Interactive dialect map

by Mark Liberman
Mahayana

O meu deu Washington DC. De fato, foi onde morei.

A cute interactive feature: "How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk" ("What does the way you speak say about where you’re from? Answer all the questions below to see your personal dialect map"), NYT 12/21/2013. The description:

Most of the questions used in this quiz are based on those in the Harvard Dialect Survey, a linguistics project begun in 2002 by Bert Vaux and Scott Golder. The original questions and results for that survey can be found on Dr. Vaux's current website.

The data for the quiz and maps shown here come from over 350,000 survey responses collected from August to October 2013 by Josh Katz, a graphics editor for the New York Times who developed this quiz. The colors on the large heat map correspond to the probability that a randomly selected person in that location would respond to a randomly selected survey question the same way that you did. The three smaller maps show which answer most contributed to those cities being named the most (or least) similar to you.

For more about the background, see Ben Zimmer's post "About those dialect maps making the rounds", 6/6/2013.

Here's my map, or at least one version of it:

The "specific cities" feature is a bit random — mine are "Baltimore" and "Saint Louis", both attributed to the fact that (like a large minority of other Americans) I lack the caught/cot merger, and "Newark/Paterson", attributed to the term "mischief night" for the night before Halloween:

"Mischief night" is one of those phrases that I've heard around, maybe when I lived in northern New Jersey for a while, though we had no such concept when I was growing up (since mischief took place on Halloween itself). The survey has a few other features like those, which tag you with particular not-necessarily-relevant cities.

I haven't been able to find a description of the algorithm used to combine information from the various maps. But there seems to be a problem, either in the interpretation of the answers or in the method of combining them, as indicated by the fact that my final map has got a lot of orange and red below the Mason-Dixon line, despite the information that I'm not a y'all speaker. The map for the y'all choice seems plausible:

But something seems to be wrong in the interpretation of not making this choice, or the method for combining choices into a final geographical pattern, or both.

One issue might just be the way of asking the questions. Though I obviously know about y'all, I'd never use it except as a joke or quotation or imitation, and similarly for you'uns and youse.  Those are positive markers of geo-social identity, while  choices like you all and you are mostly negative markers, in the sense that their interpretation depends mostly on NOT having made the other choices.

But the real usage distribution of such alternatives may not emerge accurately from answers to questions like this.  Some southerners may consider y'all to be non-standard, for example, and therefore give answers like you or you all.

Or maybe this app's method for combining evidence is suboptimal…

20 Dec 11:41

Siri’s Sex Change

by Lucy Ferriss

imagesI don’t have Siri, and so my experience of Apple’s virtual personal assistant is limited to eavesdropping on my friends’ iPhones. But it has struck me as fascinating that the voice for several years was a woman’s, at least in this country. Despite the impression that a female avatar would be “less knowledgeable,” than a male, according to the Stanford researcher Clifford Nass, Apple’s initial roll-out was given a female voice because female voices are preferred in the “helper or assistant role.” The exception, at least at first, was in France and in Britain, where users apparently go for knowledge over subservience. But the female avatar is ubiquitous enough to have spawned at least one Hollywood movie, Spike Jonze’s new “neo-classic boy-meets-operating-system romance,” Her.

These days, users can change Siri’s voice to male or female at their pleasure. Now there’s a social-science project in the making. Will more of us opt for the authoritative male voice, or the soothing female one? Will we want so-called male language, which apparently privileges exact numbers (two, five) or female language, which apparently waxes vague (some, a few)? Am I the only one who finds such assumptions about voice pitch and word choice a little disturbing?

In Japanese phone-answering systems, automated male voices get the responsible business, like executing stock transactions, but female voices field the majority of the initial queries. In fact, Japan’s chief marker of gender doesn’t lie with the virtual avatar, but with the thousands of real human beings who make up the bulk of professional phone respondents. Every year, the All-Japan Phone-Answering Competition yields a consensus on the ideal voice for fielding customer queries and complaints. Almost all the more than 12,000 contestants are female, and among them, higher voices are deemed more desirable. Delicate phrasing, the right balance of friendliness, and an overarching politeness complete the profile. This year, the winner, Kiyomi Kusunoki, did not speak “in a squeaky voice,” which I take as a sign of progress, but men are a long way from grabbing this particular prize.

One thing seems certain: If enough of us start opting for a male voice on our hand-held devices and GPS systems, Siri will no longer be called “sassy.” Nor probably will he or she (perhaps, at last, we should use ze) be called Siri, a name that originated with one of the inventors of the virtual voice, who named his daughter after “the beautiful woman who leads you to victory.” (In the U.K., the male voice has long been known as Daniel, meaning “God is my judge.”) Most alarming for its inventors, the virtual voice may devolve into, well, what it is: a technology rather than a personality, as the researcher Leila Takayama has explained.

And, we might add, a technology developed by folks who rely a great deal on common perceptions of what it means to be, and to express oneself as, male or female. Breaking new grounds in gender expectations is not, in this case, the destination on the virtual map.

19 Dec 16:50

Chuck Norris mostra a Van Damme como se faz

by Regis Freitas

Mais uma paródia do famoso comercial com o Van Damme, nesse a Delov Digital usa o imortal Chuck Norris para desejar um feliz natal de forma épica.

13 Dec 10:38

Fake sign-language interpreter at Mandela funeral

by Mark Liberman

Kim Sengupta, "Nelson Mandela memorial: ‘Bogus’ interpreter made mockery of Barack Obama’s tribute", The Telegraph 12/11/2013:

The key address in the memorial service for Nelson Mandela was given by Barack Obama, whose words were brought to life for deaf spectators and TV viewers by a “sign language interpreter”, who could be seen gesturing energetically behind the sombre US President.

Yet the man, not only seen by the tens of thousands in Johannesburg’s FNB stadium where the memorial took place on Tuesday, but also by millions across the world on television, was a “fake”, according to Bruno Druchen, the national director of the Deaf Federation of  South Africa.

Mr Duchen told the Associated Press “there was no meaning in what he used his hands for”. He and other language experts pointed out that the man was not signing in South African or American sign languages and could not have been signing in any other known sign language because there was no structure to his arm and hand movements. South African sign language covers all of the country’s 11 official languages.

Apparently, the fake interpreter was not a creative gate-crasher, but rather was a fraud who makes money by getting himself hired to provide sign-language interpretation — "Interpreter For Deaf At Mandela Event Called Fake", NPR 12/11/2013:

The man also did sign interpretation at an event last year that was attended by South African President Jacob Zuma, Druchen said. At that appearance, a deaf person in the audience videotaped the event and gave it to the deaf federation, which analyzed the video, prepared a report and submitted a formal complaint to the governing African National Congress party, Druchen said. [...]

Bogus sign-language interpreters are a problem in South Africa because people who know some signs — frequently because they have deaf relatives — try to pass themselves off as interpreters, Parkin said. And those contracting them usually don't know how to sign, so they have no idea the people they are hiring cannot do the job, she said.

"They advertise themselves as interpreters because they know 10 signs and they can make some quick money," Parkin said. "It is plain and simple abuse of the deaf community. They are taking advantage of the deaf community to make money."

[Update -- more information on the fake interpreter, from Alan Clendenning, "Mandela Interpreter With Violent Past Says He Was Hallucinating Angels, Company Owners Have 'Vanished'", AP 12/12/2013:

The man accused of faking sign interpretation while standing alongside world leaders like U.S. President Barack Obama at Nelson Mandela's memorial service said Thursday he hallucinated that angels were entering the stadium, suffers from schizophrenia and has been violent in the past.

Thamsanqa Jantjie said in a 45-minute interview with The Associated Press that his hallucinations began while he was interpreting and that he tried not to panic because there were "armed policemen around me." He added that he was once hospitalized in a mental health facility for more than one year.

A South African deputy Cabinet minister, Hendrietta Bogopane-Zulu, later held a news conference to announce that "a mistake happened" in the hiring of Jantjie.

]

I was interested to read that the fraudster's expressionless face was seen as a clue that his gestures had no meaning:

When South African Deputy President Cyril Rampaphosa told the crowd that former South African President F.W. de Klerk was among the guests, the man at his side used a strange pushing motion unknown in sign language that did not identify de Klerk or say anything about his presence, said Ingrid Parkin, principal of the St. Vincent School for the Deaf in Johannesburg.

The closest the man's gestures came to anything in sign language at that point might possibly be the words for "running horse," "friend" or "beyond," she said, but only by someone who signs terribly.

The man also used virtually no facial expressions to convey the often-emotional speeches, an absolute must for sign-language interpreters, Parkin said.

Compare Lydia Callis, the last sign language interpreter to get major press coverage:

Ms. Callis was described as "the antithesis of the stoic mayor" and "much more expressive than [Mayor Bloomberg] is". But as Eric Baković noted ("It just looks so much better in sign", 10/31/2012):

[L]ooking at the videos, I don't see anything other than a (very good) ASL interpreter — in other words, Callis is not doing anything extra special here, she's just doing her job, which is to translate what people are saying into ASL. I understand that there's the contrast with the otherwise somber Bloomberg, and that what is being translated is news about Hurricane Sandy, and that for many folks this may be one of the first times they've seen sign language interpretation up close — but I can't help pointing out here that the hand movements and facial expressions are defining features of ASL (and of other signed languages). The perception that we non-signers have that these hand movements and facial expressions are particularly "animated" and "expressive" is precisely due to our lack of experience with them as linguistic features.

And as Neal Whitman points out in the comments, you can find a clear, cogent, detailed account of (some of) Ms. Callis's facial expressions and body language here: Arika Okrent, "Why do sign language interpreters look so animated?", Mental Floss 11/1/2012.

12 Dec 12:33

Spanglish and the Royal Academy

by Ilan Stavans
Mahayana

RAE, a ABL deles.

Not long ago, the Real Academia Española, its matrix located in Madrid, with 21 branches throughout the Spanish-speaking world, did something at once surprising and disappointing: It approved the inclusion of the word espanglish in its official dictionary. I say it was surprising because for decades the RAE systematically disregarded the existence of this hybrid form of communication, suggesting it was just a passing phenomenon unworthy of serious academic consideration. Indeed, one of the institution’s recent directors, Victor García de la Concha (1998-2010), regularly declared Spanglish  “nonexistent,” as if by ignoring it the jazzy parlance of tens of millions of Latinos in the United States, as well as of scores of people anywhere in the Spanish-speaking world, would magically disappear.

But the inclusion of the word in the lexicon was disappointing because the definition the RAE proposed was misconstrued, naturally angering users on both sides of the Atlantic. In Spanish, the definition of espanglish reads: “Modalidad del habla de algunos grupos hispanos de los Estados Unidos, en la que se mezclan, deformándolos, elementos léxicos y gramaticales del español y del inglés.” I quote it in the original for readers to enjoy its hollow eloquence. In English translation: “Modality of speech used among of some Hispanic groups in the United States, in which lexical and grammatical elements of Spanish and English are mixed, becoming deformed.”

Deformed? Quite frankly, the RAE doesn’t appear to be de este mundo, “of this world,” or at least of our day and age. No respected scholar today would dare use such an ideologically charged adjective. To think of linguistic contact as deforming the concept of code is to engage in politics, not in scientific analysis. Of course, everyone knows that the one constant in any living language is change: to be up to date, to be au courant, a language needs to interact with its environment. That interaction entails loans and borrowings. In English, prairie comes from the French, rancho from the Spanish, mafia from the Italian, chutzpah from Yiddish. Is the English language polluted because it incorporates these terms? Hasn’t the base of modern English been defined by its imperial quests? Spanglish isn’t a concoction devised to aggravate highfalutin dons. It is a dialect, with specific morphological rules, that comes about from necessity. It is also, in my view, an expression of the emergence of a new mestizo civilization, part Anglo and part Hispanic.

According to historians of the Spanish language, the first American word ever to travel back to the Iberian Peninsula after 1492, when Columbus stumbled upon the so-called New World, is canoa, “canoe.” In 1496, it replaced the word barco in a grammar published by the Salamanca philologist Antonio de Nebrija, who is credited for describing el español as “la compañera del imperio,” the companion of empire. The inclusion of espanglish in the RAE dictionary may not be the first time this mixed tongue makes it in (estrés, “stress,” might have that honor) but is certainly a moment of historical proportions.

To some of us involved with the gorgeously polluted way of communicating of college students, Spanglish is an affirmation, not a negation. Unfortunately, it will take a bit longer for the RAE legislators to understand that what they consider verbal deformation is really creative rejuvenation, and that their definition of espanglish is as much a step forward as it is a step back: a hurra to a language used freely by Latinos and a statement of intellectual narrow-mindedness.

12 Dec 10:23

Getting worse and also better

by Mark Liberman

A question from Roy Peter Clark:

Last week I taught a class for a group of middle school young men and their mentors.  Almost everyone in the room was African-American.  The content of the class was the history of the n-word and its current contexts and uses. It was one of the most lively hours I have ever spent in the classroom, mostly because of the candor and fervor of the participants.

What emerged was a clear generational difference.  Each of the mentors — professional men in their 30s, 40s, and 50s — testified that they found the word "nigger" or "nigga," insulting, degrading, and demeaning, no matter who was the speaker.

The students — average age about 13 — had a more nuanced view, more inclined to take into account speaker, audience, purpose, and culture.  One young man said that he understood why some people would find the word insulting, but that "words change," and that he could use it with friends as a term of identification, solidarity, and affection. He also understood that forms of oppression could be appropriated by the oppressed and liberated to some degree from their original meanings.

I'm still processing this and trying to understand it from a linguistic or semantic perspective.  It appears to me that in my lifetime the word "nigger" has shifted in two opposite directions.  It is more pejorative than ever, evidenced by how often it is spelled only with its first letter:  the n-word.  But there is obviously some amelioration going on in some communities, where it can be spoken in a way that inspires a manly hug and not a fist to the face.

Does these sound right to you?  And can anyone think of other words that have changed semantically in opposite directions at the same time?  Thanks, wordinistas.

11 Dec 11:42

Cold Comfort for Graphophobes

by Lucy Ferriss

3657055_com_writersblockjckI’m writing under deadline, having promised this post to my editor this morning, and I will get it to her this morning, if you count “morning” as lasting until 1:00 p.m., which is when civilized people eat lunch, right?

It is the season to procrastinate. Our excuses are manifold—too many committee meetings, exams to grade, application files to review, holiday cards to mail, presents to purchase, students to reassure, recommendations to write. One can almost revel in it, if one has incurable graphophobia, like old Saussure.

Saussure?

Apparently so, according to Ingrid Piller of Language on the Move, who reports on an archive of letters Saussure sent with varying explanations for his tardiness in delivering an article. The father of 20th-century linguistics had enormous trouble setting pen to paper. Colleagues attributed his procrastination to perfectionism and the incredible care he wished to take in presenting such new concepts. But let’s face it. Those are the excuses presented by most of my students (the ones who’ve run out of claims to dying grandmothers and lingering flu symptoms) when they beg for a last-minute extension. They’re the excuses I give my editor when I run past the noon deadline.

Still, procrastination in writing feels different, doesn’t it, from putting off scrubbing the bathroom or reading applications? Its roots seem to lie less in the warm soil of Saussure’s paresse scripturale (scriptorial laziness) than in the dry, strangulating mud of horreure d’ecrire.

Just yesterday, I met with a student who wanted to rewrite a piece she’d composed early in the semester, but she felt she had grown so much as a writer that the syntax of her September sentences and the way she’d leapt from paragraph to paragraph felt all wrong, like the work of someone else. No problem, I told her. You still want to write the same story, with the same character, but you have new (and, one hopes, more enlightened) ways to go about it. Keep the earlier version open on your desk and take out a new pad of paper, or open a new file on the computer. Then tell yourself you’re just going to write or type the story over again. Within half a sentence, your enriched sensibility will take over, and new sentences, a new point of view, a different scene will start presenting themselves.

Her eyes widened. I asked what was the matter. Ink was cheap, I said. Typing or scribbling would do no damage to her finger muscles. “But the page,” she said just above a whisper. “It’ll be blank.”

Yes, I know. That is the horror. Of course, it should pass quickly—write one sentence, and the page is no longer blank. But then there’s the next sentence, and the one after that.

Saussure’s procrastination, and my own, remind me of what I learned when I first tried downhill skiing at the advanced age of 17. To execute graceful turns as you descend the hill, you need to descend fast enough for the edge of the downhill ski to dig into the snow and swing you around. You won’t really stop being frightened of those turns until you work up enough speed to be sure they’ll work. But you won’t be able to work up that speed until you stop being frightened. The analogy to graphophobia is that you won’t stop fearing the blank page until you have filled it, but you can’t begin to fill it until you get over your fear of it.

Saussure managed to get his brilliant work out … barely. His Cours de Linguistique Générale was published posthumously. So following in his footsteps may make us feel we have brilliant companionship on the path of procrastination, but it does little else. We just have to get on the skis, face the slope, and push off. Here I go. In just a minute. Or maybe two.

11 Dec 11:07

Banning Students’ Native Dialects

by Geoffrey Pullum
Mahayana

"Linguists have been here before. It was established in the 1960s, through painstaking applied sociolinguistic research in Scandinavia as well as the United States, that there is a clear outcome difference between two strategies relating to local dialect speech: (A) strictly banning the local dialect and insisting on the prestige standard in class from the outset, and (B) accepting and welcoming local dialect speech at first and then gradually transitioning students toward the standard language over a year or two. The bottom line is that B was found to work better than A. Children improve more, in all subjects, under policy B."

Ressaltando: ... through painstaking applied sociolinguistic research...

The teaching profession in Britain, where I currently reside, has very largely heard the sociolinguistic music: The facts of linguistic diversity and language change are generally accepted, teachers acknowledge most of the elementary facts about language, and dialect differences are not viewed in the same light as hideously disfiguring skin diseases. I had begun to think there was little danger of the British teaching profession being disrupted by an outburst of race or class bias masquerading as dialect purism comparable to the awful Oakland “Ebonics” brouhaha of 1996 (see my “Language That Dare Not Speak Its Name,” Nature 386, 27 March 1997, 321-322).

But recently the Colley Lane Primary School in Halesowen, in the West Midlands, sapped some of my confidence with a campaign to humiliate its own students by denigrating their native mode of speech. The school issued a list of 10 phrases that are to be banned from school premises, banned simply because teachers think they represent features of the local dialect.

The dialect in question is that of the Black Country, a region of the West Midlands to the north and west of Birmingham. You’ll be relieved to learn that “Black” here has nothing to do with race. The area was for a long time a center of coal mining and industrial activity, and the associated griminess gave rise to the sobriquet.

Here is the list of putative local dialect features that the Colley Lane teachers have banned from their elementary school:

  1. “They was” instead of “they were.”
  2. “I cor do that” instead of “I can’t do that.”
  3. “Ya” instead of “you.”
  4. “Gonna” instead of “going to.”
  5. “Woz” instead of “was.”
  6. “I day” instead of “I didn’t.”
  7. “I ain’t” instead of “I haven’t.”
  8. “Somefink” instead of “something.”
  9. “It wor me” instead of “it wasn’t me.”
  10. “Ay?” instead of “pardon?”

The ignorance of English dialects displayed here is shocking. The majority of the list covers features that are not local to the Black Country at all.

Was for were in the paradigm of be occurs in many nonstandard dialects of English, in America as well as Britain, and ain’t occurs in all of them.

The reduced-stress form of you that novelists write as ya (International Phonetic Alphabet [jə]) is not even nonstandard, only informal: In a sentence like You can’t refuse a request like that, even if you want to, virtually nobody pronounces the occurrences of you as [ju:].

Gonna ([ɡənə]), as a verb of near-future temporal aspect, is likewise found in most varieties of Standard English: Very few speakers say [ɡoʊiŋ] in the sentence that is formally written I’m going to do it.

“Woz” seems to be just a pointless deliberate misspelling of a normal British pronounciation of was ([wɒz]).

“Somefink” for something is a nonstandard pronunciation, but is just as familiar from other dialects such as Cockney as from the Black Country: Labiodentals like [f] are substituted for interdentals like [θ], and voiceless stops are inserted adjacent to nasals.

And finally, “ay” seems to be just the usual request for repetition or confirmation that is spelled “eh” in representations of Canadian English and pronounced [ei].

So nearly all of the items on the list are simply familiar features of nonstandard dialects spoken around the world, some of them present also in informal Standard English (the way the teachers doubtless speak it).

What we are left with is the trivial matter of three pronunciations of negated auxiliary verbs: In the Black Country, apparently, we find cor for can’t, wor for wasn’t, and day for didn’t.

So what’s the appropriate reaction to such small but clearly nonstandard local dialect features? Should they be banned on school premises?

Linguists have been here before. It was established in the 1960s, through painstaking applied sociolinguistic research in Scandinavia as well as the United States, that there is a clear outcome difference between two strategies relating to local dialect speech: (A) strictly banning the local dialect and insisting on the prestige standard in class from the outset, and (B) accepting and welcoming local dialect speech at first and then gradually transitioning students toward the standard language over a year or two. The bottom line is that B was found to work better than A. Children improve more, in all subjects, under policy B. (Notice, I’m not advocating that we should pretend nonstandard features are standard; I’m talking about what empirical research shows is the most successful way of inculcating the standard.)

Fifty years later, the Colley Lane Primary School in the English Midlands shows us that educated people are often pretty clueless about dialects of their native language, and that it takes a little while for academic research on educational matters to have any real effect. In fact, when it comes to language, the time taken for research to change classroom culture and practices might be better measured in decades or centuries than in years.

09 Dec 10:10

Estado grave

by Daniel Cassol

atl

Por onde começar? Talvez por afastar as falsas expectativas.

Após acontecimentos de grande comoção, como a batalha campal deste domingo em Joinville, é comum pensarmos que providências sérias serão tomadas. Mas vamos nos lembrar de Kevin Espada, o adolescente boliviano que morreu ao ser atingido por um sinalizador disparado desde a torcida do Corinthians, em Oruro, em jogo da Libertadores.

A Conmebol surpreendeu ao anunciar a punição ao clube com jogos sem torcida, mas voltou atrás antes que houvesse tempo de parecer que a entidade estivesse mudando de postura em relação à violência nos estádios sul-americanos. Antes disso, como prova de que ninguém se importa, quatro torcedores conseguiram uma liminar para assistirem sozinhos à partida no Pacaembu, numa das cenas mais infames da temporada. O presidente do Corinthians tratou os presos de Oruro como mártires.

A bola continuou rolando.

Na tarde deste domingo (8), as televisões que transmitiam Atlético-PR e Vasco da Gama mostraram um torcedor já inconsciente tendo a cabeça pisoteada por vários homens. Mais acima, o corpo de um segundo homem desmaiado assumia o formato da arquibancada e se esparramava por dois ou três degraus. Torcidas organizadas dos dois clubes protagonizavam uma batalha campal na Arena Joinville, onde o jogo era disputado porque o Atlético cumpria pena de mando de campo. Após mais de uma hora de paralisação e enquanto quatro torcedores se encontravam em estado grave no hospital da cidade, com informações desencontradas sobre o falecimento de um deles, a partida era retomada e o narrador da Globo anunciava em tom entusiasmado:

- Vamos para o último tempo do Campeonato Brasileiro!

Duas notas divulgadas na noite de domingo dão o tom do que será o debate daqui para frente. O ministro do Esporte Aldo Rebelo disse que “condena a violência”. O Bom Senso FC disse que apoia a “tolerância zero para a violência nos estádios” e Rebelo anunciou que “vai procurar o Conselho Nacional do Ministério Público para um entendimento comum sobre a presença da Polícia Militar no interior dos estádios de futebol”.

Uma maneira de não encarar um problema complexo é fingir que o problema é outro. A ausência da Polícia Militar no interior da Arena Joinville certamente foi decisiva para que a briga entre os torcedores chegasse a níveis tão brutais, o que não torna inválido o argumento pela saída da polícia dos estádios. Independentemente de onde tenha partido a decisão – há um jogo de empurra entre PM e Ministério Público – a questão é como proceder quando se toma uma decisão desta magnitude. No começo da briga, não havia seguranças privados e apenas uma cerca separava duas torcidas organizadas com histórico de enfrentamento entre si. O jogo deveria ter sido realizado nestas condições? Podemos ter estádios de futebol sem a presença da Polícia Militar, mas é algo que precisa ser construído com decisões e precauções corretas.

Por outro lado, condenar a violência tem tanto significado quanto ser contra a corrupção ou a favor do nascer do sol. Embora pareça, não se trata de uma afirmação ingênua, na medida em que esse discurso de tolerância zero à violência acaba resultado em mais repressão e, portanto, mais violência. Não custa lembrar: já proibiram bebida alcoólica, aumentaram o preço dos ingressos e reduziram (em alguns casos a zero) a presença de torcida adversária nos clássicos. A violência não diminuiu. Porque a opção sempre foi por punir o torcedor de forma geral, enquanto responsáveis diretos e indiretos pela violência nos estádios não sofrem punição alguma.

Os agressores filmados e fotografados em tentativas de homicídio serão condenados pela Justiça mas continuarão a frequentar os estádios. Tantos outros envolvidos na carnificina em Joinville não serão identificados. Combinarão novas brigas e não serão pegos. Os clubes sofrerão no máximo a perda do mando de campo de alguns jogos – o que não resolve o problema, como se viu neste domingo. A relação conivente e clube de dirigentes e renomados torcedores violentos não será enfrentada de nenhuma forma (e notem que aqui não se pratica generalização contra torcidas organizadas, mas por outro lado se entende que o problema não pode ser ignorado).

A solução virá a granel, com medidas tão drásticas quanto paliativas, com mais polícia nos estádios e mais punições aos torcedores em geral, até que o futebol brasileiro chegue à situação falimentar do futebol argentino e seus jogos com torcida única – que não estancaram a sangria entre barrabravas. Não há tempo nem disposição para discutir as causas da violência no futebol – certamente mais complexas do que o descrito acima. Continuaremos atacando os sintomas, mesmo sabendo que o paciente está em estado grave sem sinais de melhora.

Afinal, temos que dar continuidade ao espetáculo.

Daniel Cassol

09 Dec 00:37

dolphin-spit: oswaldofguadalupe: The Twitter Mandela Hall Of...











dolphin-spit:

oswaldofguadalupe:

The Twitter Mandela Hall Of Shame

worth a read

07 Dec 00:49

nationalpostsports: World Cup 2014 draw: Brazil falls onto easy...

by joberholtzer
Mahayana

Hahahahahaha olha os gringo chamando a chave dos EUA de ~Grupo da Morte~



nationalpostsports:

World Cup 2014 draw: Brazil falls onto easy path, USA joins Germany and Portugal in Group of Death

Defending champion Spain will play its opening World Cup game against the Netherlands, a repeat of the 2010 final, while host Brazil faces a relatively easy path to the knockout stage after Friday’s draw. (Photo: Christophe Simon/AFP/Getty Images)