Category: language

» I’ve been an avid reader all my life.
» I have a BA in Linguistics.
» I’ve studied seven foreign languages.
» I taught reading for over two years.
» I wrote a grammar curriculum.

Words are really important to me.

Thing Explainer by Randall Munroe

To create Thing Explainer, Randall drew and labeled pictures to—well—explain various scientific and cultural ideas, but he chose to write all the text in the book using only a thousand commonly-used English words, just like he did when he published the comic “Up-Goer Five”.

Using the tool he made, you can write like that, too. Um, that is, you can try. (Good luck.)

The book straddles the border between humor and science. On the one hand, transforming simplified English labels back into conventional ones makes us chuckle; sometimes the “simple” labels are quite obscure, thus deciphering them can be both tricky and rewarding, like the word game Taboo. On the other hand, the simplified English goes a long way towards actually explaining things; science books sometimes raise as many questions as they answer because the explanations in them use terms that are as unfamiliar to readers as whatever the terms are intended to explain.

I think the book is best understood as Randall’s clever way of explaining stuff he knows about to clever people who might or might not know as much as he does on the subjects he chose to address. Seen in this light, the book helps us appreciate the power of words as flexible, useful tools in the hands of a talented wordsmith, and gives us the sense that, in principle, there is nothing under the sun anywhere in the universe (including the sun) that can’t be explained in an approachable way.

See below for when and why I read the book, and a list of the explained things.

Continue reading Thing Explainer by Randall Munroe

Jokes and the Linguistic Mind by Debra Aarons

Question: What do you call a cross between a collection of hilarious jokes and a collection of dull academic papers written by a dyed-in-the-wool Chomskyan linguist?

Answer: A big disappointment.

Jokes sit at the intersection of language, cognitive psychology and  illusions, all topics that fascinate me. Sadly, however, I was rather bored by Jokes and the Linguistic Mind. I think the reason was not that the author explained the jokes but that she did it in what I felt was an unnecessarily long-winded, robotic, repetitive, jargony kind of way. Anyone who explains jokes takes the well-known risk of killing the frog to understand it better, but I think once you’ve killed the frog, you should jolly well stop beating it like a dead horse.

Silver lining? I love the MC Escher stairscape on the cover. Moreover, many of the jokes used as examples of various linguistic phenomena were funny. See below for more on the aspects of the book I enjoyed.

Continue reading Jokes and the Linguistic Mind by Debra Aarons

Release level to stop

Since the picture is too far away and blurry, you’ll have to take my word for it that these are the steps for using this Downtown Line fire extinguisher:

  1. [pull out the pin, presumably]
  2. AIM AT BASE OF FIRE
  3. SQUEEZE LEVEL TO DISCHARGE
  4. RELEASE LEVEL TO STOP

(I’m pretty sure they meant “lever”.)

Hang on, I’ve got a slightly better photo:

16 Sep 2017

Here’s the extinguisher in my lift lobby (which says “lever”):

16 Sep 2017

“Dr Bags is the trusted aesthetics clinic for your designer bags.”

I didn’t know designer bags needed an aesthetics clinic, but that’s probably just because I don’t own one.

Unless the upcycled seat-belt kind counts. (Probably not.)

Anyway, I’m posting this photo because I was surprised to see the word “ain’t” used in a Singapore ad. It struck me as especially strange because the ad is for a luxury service. Not, you know, grits or cornbread muffins or something similarly folksy and homey.

The ad says:

It’s not luxury if it ain’t clean.

After I thought about it, I realized there’s a third level of weirdness, which is that the first half of sentence uses “it’s” and the second half of the sentence uses “ain’t”. I guess I would have expected two uses of “it’s” or two uses of “ain’t”, not one of each.

But maybe the contrast between the two contractions explains the whole thing.

The more standard word “it’s” goes with the idea of “luxury” and the more casual word “ain’t” goes with the idea of “not clean”.

Or I’m overthinking it.

…In Fact, It’s Our Specialty!

When I was a teacher, some of my students would bring to class bags displaying the name, logo, and endlessly amusing tagline of Tien Hsia Language School.

So finally I took a photo of the exterior wall of one of the Tien Hsia centers.

I think “Tien Hsia”, or 天下 (pinyin tiānxià), means “the world”.

I gladly concede the loss of historical ‘decimate’.

That’s part of page 105 of the 1952 edition of Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage. I looked up the word after I read the plot summary in the Wikipedia entry about the film Inferno (2016), which currently says:

[The villain’s bioweapon has] the potential of decimating the world’s population.

It could be argued that a 50% reduction in the world’s population, technically, does not count as “decimating”, since—as has been smugly pointed out—the meaning of “decimate” is etymologically tied to a figure of 10%.

In fact, it’s been argued (even more smugly) that “decimate” had another, earlier meaning, which was financial in nature; supposedly “decimate” meant “tithe”.

I think I agree with Fowler that “decimate” can now legitimately mean “destroy a large proportion” but should still be avoided when the context contains a specific proportion.

See below for more on my reasons for (finally) ceasing to believe exclusively in the historical meaning and my thoughts on how to carefully use the word in its widely accepted modern sense.

Continue reading I gladly concede the loss of historical ‘decimate’.

Noun noun noun noun

This is a notice in the lift here in Kent Vale notifying residents of the management’s intent to conduct an exercise in which they will clear the bicycles that have been abandoned in the bicycle rack areas.

The lineup of four nouns (bicycle, clearance, exercise, notice) verges on the cumbersome, but in principle you could go on modifying nouns with other nouns until the cows come home.

For your ruminating pleasure, I present this truly unwieldy noun phrase:

university freshman student campus dormitory ground floor kitchen cleaning schedule establishment group selection committee meeting date email notification recipient complaint management task handler assignment deadline

It denotes the deadline before which someone has to assign a handler for the task of managing complaints from people who have received email notifications about a committee meeting for the purpose of selecting a group for establishing the schedule according to which people will clean the kitchen on the ground floor of a freshman dorm on the campus of a university—except that it’s ever so much more concise.

Chinese largely copes without articles and prepositions; surely English could, too!

Longing for longans

This is a box of longan fruit. The longan is a kind of fruit related to lychee and rambutan. The text on the box says:

Fresh Longan
Longing for longans… grab a handful of this sweet, fleshy fruit and enjoy it’s exotic taste!

The box contains some truly tasty fruit, but it’s a shame that its punctuation is rotten.

Words related to ‘receive’

recipient-receptacle
This is a bag of Persil laundry detergent. It says: “Keep product inside bag or transfer to another plastic recipient.”

The word ‘recipient’ sounds weird here because normally (I would think) a recipient is a person, and the instructions are obviously talking about a thing (a container or ‘receptacle’). The words ‘recipient’ and ‘receptacle’ are related but I think there’s good reason not to treat them as interchangeable.

See also: ‘recipe’, ‘receipt’, ‘reception’, and ‘receiver’.

I would say a ‘receiver’ is more typically a thing (a telephone receiver or a piece of audio equipment, for example), but in American football a receiver is a person. Go figure.

I’m told that in the UK there’s a school level called ‘reception’ that corresponds to Kindergarten. That sounds hilarious to me because I think of a reception as a fancy party, like the kind you have after a wedding, so my mental image of ‘reception’ doesn’t require or perhaps even permit four-year-old children.

This is the perfect cue for that variously attributed quotation about Brits and Americans being “one people separated by a common language”.