The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

Last night Richard Lanham spoke to my Rhetoric and Copyright class. He's a writing expert and has written several books like Analyzing Prose. He emphasizes the point that prose can be looked at (seeing how the words are arranged stylistically) or looked through (getting to the gist of the idea), and being able to do both is a good idea.

After the presentation I asked him a question which morphed into a discussion on emoticons. I said how I tried to avoid using them, thinking that they were a crutch and that the language should be able to convey the same expression if used correctly.

He was not so critical. When I said suggested that the language must have been able to have conveyed the same thing before emoticons were developed he wasn't so sure. He likened it to the evolution of any punctuation. Originally language was written without any, so it required a rarified expertise to be able to read and know where to put in the breaks. When punctuation came along there was a lot of resistance - shouldn't the language be able to express itself fully without these devices? - but it eventually became accepted because punctuation turned out to be a good idea in helping to convey an even wider panolpoly of ideas. So might emoticons be, he suggested. They are a new form of punctuation that may turn out to be just as valuable as its older kin, so being presumptively hostile to them may deprive language from expanding to include other tools that can help us be more expressive.

Why is there such a thing as Limited Edition Gatorade?" Are we supposed to collect them all (apparently there are 25 in the "series")? Will they be worth something in 10 or 20 years? Do people sell them on eBay? Are some more rare than others? Do the Gatorade people expect that shoppers will be more likely to buy Gatorade as opposed to an alternative sports drink because "Ooo! It's limited edition!" Or, do they think that people otherwise uninterested in purchasing sports drinks might somehow be swayed to add it to their list? "Let's see... Eggs... check. Milk... check. Bread... check. Guess I'm ready to go-- oh look! Gatorade! And it's Limited Edition! Can't pass that up!" Do the Gatorade people really think that's gonna happen?

And how is it that putting the same old sports drink into a bottle with a silver label and three little bits of sports trivia justifies calling it a "limited edition?" Wouldn't you expect there to be something different about the fluid?

Anyway, these are the questions that will keep me up at night, I can tell.

On the soccer field today:

Teammate: Cathy, why don't you go play fullback.

Me: (panicked at the prospect) That's not a position where I have any competency.

Other teammate: You talk like Mr. Data!

I didn't mind the comparison, but it did conjure up unpleasant memories from summer camp, age 12-14, when no one would *listen* to a thing I had to say, but would always ask me in response to anything I said, "Why do you use such big words?"

Sadly, what I had in vocabulary I lacked in self-confidence and I could never manage a sufficient retort that could stave off the alienating humiliation their comments inflicted on me. It hurt my feelings that the other campers never really cared about what I was trying to communicate, only the words that I used. I was frustrated that their limitations had somehow become my problem, and that I was made to feel that using language precisely was something to be ashamed of.

As an adult, fortunately, I find that I'm taken more seriously, no matter how I phrase my sentences. Although I should perhaps point out here that I still had to go play fullback. Maybe they didn't really care about what I had to say after all...

Last night I helped my dad clear the table. "Where do we put the trivet?" I asked.

Then I interrupted myself. "What a useless word, 'trivet.' In a way it's nice that there's such a precise word for this specific thing, but it's sort of a waste of mental space to have to know a word that almost never gets used."

To which my dad said, "Oh, I don't know. I try to use it three to four times a day."

And then, over the course of the rest of the evening, he did. Of course, not always in its original meaning, as a noun describing a portable flat surface upon which one sets hot dishes. But sometimes as a verb or an adjective. Which necessarily involved adding some new meanings to its definition, as the context it was used in would dictate.

At first its meaning fluctuated somewhat randomly, but over the course of the evening it did seem to take on a consistent usage. As an adjective it sort of described a state of flummoxed confusion. In fact, in a way it described that particular condition better than any other actual English word did. So much so that I think the word "trivet" (or, in this case, "triveted") should be adopted for common parlance.

I suspect it could be done so successfully, as at one point my sister wandered into the room when my dad inserted the word into conversation. It was perfectly clear to me what he was saying when he used it, but not so my sister who had never come across this word before – despite her rather expansive vocabulary. Completely trusting that it was an actual word in an actual dictionary, she asked my dad what it meant so she could add it to her repertoire. I think she genuinely expected that it would have some lengthy etymology, dating back perhaps to Ancient Greece. As opposed to the backyard, an hour earlier.

This summer when I drove across the country I tried to learn German from CDs. I went through one set on my way out west, but then came back east too quickly to be able to do any more. (Trying to get through a thousand miles a day seemed inconducive to paying attention to German lessons. And paying attention to German lessons seemed incompatible with not crashing the car. So I opted to skip the German...)

Which was too bad, because I really had very little in terms of local language skills to work with when I got here. This is unfortunate, and pales to my experience moving to France when I had the basics of the language and a reasonable vocabulary under my belt already to build upon. Now I'm starting just a little bit ahead of square one.

On the other hand, I can say things like, "Excuse me, I would like something to eat," and "The opera is here." And I have some idea how the language works, having taken an intensive three-week course when I was 13. Plus I've studied Latin, Spanish, Russian, and French, and have lots of faith in my ability to learn languages. Still, I've got my work cut out for me. Today I took a placement test for the language classes offered by Bucerius and it was all I could do not to completely fail the thing. On the plus side, however, I placed out of the most basic class, and if I make a lot of progress they'll let me go into the next class up. I wonder how much I can cram this weekend...?

But the best thing has been the instances when I've been out and about and managed to use German in conversation. In one case I asked if a store had a little street map. In another instance I asked where something was. The hazard in both cases was that I couldn't really understand the answers when they came at me in German. On the other hand, it was flattering that the answers DID come at me in German, and I don't think they were saying that they didn't understand me – I think they were answers appropriate for the context.

That is the most amazing feeling, to be understood in another language, and it's a huge motivating force to keep doing this, to work as hard as I need to build up this skill. The effort involved is well worth the reward.

Posted 9/2/05.

One of the reasons I'm so fixated on foreign language skills is that, despite always valuing the import of speaking another language, it wasn't until well into adulthood where I finally began to be able to do so. And there's really no excuse for that.

Yes, my having begun my foreign language education with Latin may not have been a good first step in acquiring fluency in any modern, spoken languages. But in my high school sophomore year I switched to Spanish. And in a bureaucratic twist I still can't figure out how I was able to achieve, I got to take Spanish in a private class. I met one-on-one with the teacher, every day during lunch, and we cranked through two years' worth of curriculum in one. It was an amazing opportunity, and it helped me grasp grammatical concepts that I still build upon today in any language that I speak.

But it was Spanish I and II, and in my school the subjunctive wasn't taught until Spanish III. And Spanish uses the subjunctive A LOT. Many things that can be expressed in the indicative in English would come out wrong if spoken in the indicative in Spanish. So my teacher said, regularly, "Don't try to speak. You don't know the grammar and you'll get it wrong."

So I never, ever spoke Spanish. In fact, I was afraid to – I would be wrong! Instead I patiently waited until that far off day when a teacher would tap me on the shoulder and say, "OK, now you're ready to speak Spanish."

When the truth of the matter is that you can speak a foreign language from the first word you learn. Speaking is about the exchange of ideas. It doesn't take an expansive vocabulary and sophisticated grammar to do it – it just takes the attempt. Which is not to say you should pass off unintelligible gibberish as a foreign language, but you need to start making attempts at the connection so that experience will be able to plug the gaps and teach you the rest of the language. Without speaking, learning a language is like learning algebra – you might get the formulas down, but you'll never be able to actually speak it.

It's tragic, really, all that time wasted. All that time where we could have had oral drill after oral drill. And I would have finished my sophomore year with the confidence to have a conversation. Instead, I finished the next year, the year after, and a year of college Spanish and never had a conversation in Spanish with anyone. It's so stupid – it's the language I've actually studied more than any other yet it's the one I speak the least.

But my adult experience with French, and my recent forays into German, give me hope that I could someday, with a little effort, learn to actually speak Spanish. It's a very regular language, grammatically, and I still remember most of the concepts, if not the exact structures. With a textbook and a conversational opportunity, I think I could learn it. Someday I hope I do.

I decided I'd like to get myself a Spanish grammar textbook so that I can re-teach it to myself. My experience in Germany, reviewing my German textbook, showed me that it can be a very effective learning tool. I have good, college-level textbooks now for German, French, and Russian that I trust can keep me fresh in my knowledge. But because I learned Spanish in high school, I don't have my own grammar book for it that I can use to review in the same way.

So yesterday I went to the BU bookstore and looked at the textbooks they had on the shelves for the BU students to use in their Spanish classes. I found one. I only found one (perhaps there were more, but their numbers were dwarfed by the vast stacks of the one I did find). It was terrible. It looked more like a high school textbook than a college one. College textbooks, like college courses, are really good at getting down to business and going over a lot of grammar, which is why I feel like such a book could be a good investment. Going through them can give you all the tools you need to start working with the language. But this book was so over-designed as to be rendered useless. It was full of pictures, color, sidebars… There might have been some grammar in it somewhere, but not that I could easily see. There was so much going on, graphically, that the words were completely drowned out. It looked like it was aimed at bored high school students who needed the book to entertain them in order to keep them focused. Grammar was an afterthought - the book was all about social studies: "Let's learn about Spanish-speaking people!"

Needless to say, I didn't buy it. But then, as it happened, last night I had to go over to Cambridge. While I was there I stopped in to look at the textbooks in the Harvard bookstore. They had several, and all of them were vastly better: mono- or dichromatic, but chock full of grammar. They were like the New York Times of textbooks, whereas the BU one was more like People magazine.

It's not that I object to color: my German and French books use some color and have some pictures and sidebars too. But they never interfere with the substance of the lesson. Neither did the ones at Harvard. The ones at Harvard understood that the students were ready to learn and so made it the number one priority to teach them, without the condescension and distraction inherent in the book used by BU.

The only downside with the Harvard books is that they were a little expensive, so I have not purchased one yet. But the shopping experience does make me glad that when I was an undergrad I chose not to attend BU, even though I'd applied and gotten in. The college language courses I'd had at Cal were distinctive in that they were HARD. Not impossibly hard, but there was none of this aesthetic coddling. And the results paid off: after one year of college French I had enough pieces of the language to be able to move there and start trying it out. (And had I been paying more attention in my Russian class, I'd have been able to speak that too…) Yet given the choice of books that BU seems to like to use, I don't think the same could have been said had I gone here instead.

I wrote this last December. I'm not sure why I didn't post it then, but I think it's still worth throwing out there now, so here it is:

I read a cute blog post written by a law student whose toddler son just uttered his first sentence.

"I am struck, as I march wearily through Evidence, at how effortlessly Nathaniel learns. We adults, we must choose to learn something new. We dedicate ourselves to learning consciously. If we didn't want to learn anything new for the rest of our lives, we could. Plenty of people drift unresisting along that route through life."

Certainly there is something marvelous, as she goes on to describe, about how children are so inexorably drawn to learning new things, and how they do it so easily. But for grown-ups, maybe it's not that we're any less adept at learning but that what's left for us to learn is things like Evidence. Something that's learned in a much more mechanical, deliberate, and less-rewarding fashion than the really cool, substantive stuff like walking and talking.

The other day I went back to the bike shop I've visited several times since I've been in Germany, including in the first few weeks when I had no German skills whatsoever. Back then I had to make the staff speak to me in English, since there was no way anything would get communicated otherwise. But on this day I strode in confidently. I asked my German friend for just one word, the particular one for the part I needed. "Why don't you just ask them in English?" he asked. But I couldn't do that. Not here, anyway. It was a matter of pride.

So armed with my word I went up to the counter and asked for what I needed. The whole conversation only consisted of a few sentences back and forth, but it was indeed back and forth. I asked for what I wanted, he responded with a question, I answered it, and then he provided the information I needed. And by the end of it we both understood each other perfectly.

Outside my friend marveled at how quickly I'd learned to speak that well. Now, let's not kid anyone: I'm only barely functional, and my conversational ability is strongly limited by my tiny vocabulary. And what I can say I may not always say quite right, or quite smoothly. But I can communicate in this language, that is clear. And maybe my friend is right to be impressed.

The thing is, it was easy to learn. Surprisingly easy. And much easier than learning things like Evidence. Because unlike rote, mechanical things like Evidence, learning a language is a dynamic process full of reinforcing affirmations. It wasn't something I learned abstractly and then took a test for, after which I needed to wait days or even weeks for feedback on whether I'd learned anything at all. Learning German, here I got feedback immediately, on the spot, with every word I uttered. That dawning look of understanding on the other person's face, it helped to immediately cement in my brain everything new I'd absorbed.

It does matter, of course, that I learned German in a German-speaking place. Learning a language in a rote form, far removed from anyone you could connect to with it, is much like learning Evidence. I gave up Latin in high school for that very reason. But I switched to Spanish in an environment where, though it is a living language, it was so detached from anyone who lived in that language that the educational experience was just like learning Evidence – a discrete set of material to be learned and memorized, but nothing more than that. And so while I can say I've learned Spanish – I studied it quite a bit – it's still not a language I can (so far) in any way say I truly know how to speak.

But in the right environment, somewhere where you can explore and decode language with each breath you take and be rewarded for your discovery almost immediately, it's amazingly easy to learn, and no matter how old you are - whether you're a one year old child in your parents' arms or a 31 year old in a new neighborhood.

Or at the very least, it's much easier than Evidence.

Written 12/13/05.

Seeing the article in the New York Times about the renaissance of the French language in Maine, and how the French government is trying to encourage it, reminded me of some of the tv news magazine shows I saw when I used to live in France. They were absolutely fascinated by the francophonic bits tucked away in the United States. I remember in particular a long segment one of them did on a community of French-speaking people in Louisiana, for whom this language had been passed down for centuries. The French took tremendous pride in this legacy, as was reflected in their TV shows.

(Separately, the French also seemed fascinated with American long-haul trucking, as I saw quite a few segments on that...)

An article in the NY Times entitled "His Hipness, John G. Roberts" led Ann Althouse to post with the subject line, "Some hipness and squareness about John Roberts."

That got me wondering about the origin of the pairing "hip" and "square," because you often run into people associating the two. And lots of time they do it in joking reference to the Huey Lewis and the News song, "Hip to be Square." But, I wondered on the HLN fan board, is that the etymological origin?

Apparently not, according to the drummer Bill Gibson. He thinks it comes from the beat generation and remembers his jazz buff dad using the pairing in the 50s. Which I guess helps explain why Huey used it as a lyric (his dad was a jazz drummer so he probably had heard the pairing too). But I'm still curious whether the song helped push (or give it a renewed push) it into common parlance. There's a lot of people who would know nothing of jazz or beat poetry who still use the pairing, so even if it technically had a different origin, for them it may have been the song that put it in their vocabulary.*

Any historical linguists who want to weigh in on this? I'm a bad measure of it because I first heard the song when I was 12, several years before I knew anything about jazz or beat poetry or was more widely familiar with common phraseology, and because as a fan in my mind I was always presuming the association, even if the people using the pair were not.

Incidentally, it's always been a sore point for the band that the song has been misunderstood. Most people take it to mean something along the lines that standing out uniquely is what's hip, but Huey was actually making the opposite observation. He's been quoted in interviews as saying that (in 1986 when the song was written) he was thinking about how people who had been such radical hippies in the 60s 20 years later had cleaned up so nice and become the conformist "squares" they used to rail about. The rest of the lyrics are consistent with this view. For instance:

I used to be a renegade, I used to fool around
But I couldn't take the punishment, and had to settle down
Now I'm playing it real straight, and yes I cut my hair
You might think I'm crazy, but I don't even care
Because I can tell what's going on
It's hip to be square

* Edit 7/10: To clarify, I don't mean that the words "hip" or "square" weren't in people's vocabulary. Or even, necessarily, that people didn't use them as antonym pairs. But it might be a generational thing, to some degree. People of my generation or younger do not typically run around using the word "square" to nearly the same degree as people used to, and the only reason they may be inclined to use it now is necessarily in oppositional reference to the utilization of "hip."

In fact, if true this may help explain why the song is so often misunderstood because to say "it's hip to be square" conjures up different ironic views for different people depending on how they define the word "square." For younger people it's the unique people who are squares, whereas it used to be the conventional people who were. For people like Huey the irony therefore is contextual, in that the popular, "hip" thing to do is be conventional. Whereas for others the irony is paradoxical, in that the popular, "hip" thing to do is be different. So maybe the etymological tracing of current "hip" and "square" pairing usage depends on which meaning of the word "square" the conflater tends to think of.

As China develops there are more and more signs written in English around the country. Sometimes the English is fine. Sometimes... not so much.

Sometimes the errors are typographical, like the "tarvel agency" in the Beijing hotel.

Other times the writing is obviously written by someone who knows English grammar, but who is obviously using a dictionary to supplement their vocabulary without a way to judge which would be the most idiomatically correct choice of a definition. Like the tv in the hotel in Xian that bore the sign that said something like, "Our tv has 50 channels. They are all in order."

And sometimes you get things like this:

Or this:

"All offers communicated based on a $100 spend."

Oh wait. That last one wasn't Chinese - it was a sentence in a United Airlines mass mailing...!

I've always thought it sad somehow that people tend to groan at a pun. To be fair, a pun is a little hard to react to because it's not humorous in an obvious, laugh-eliciting way. For a regular joke, or an obviously humorous situation, a laugh is an instinctive, immediate reaction to our recognition of an unexpected absurdity, some sort of ironic contrast between what was anticipated and what was observed. But a pun's humor is often more subtle. It usually has to be thought about or processed somehow, thus evoking a slower reaction, and its humor is often less starkly obvious. As a result, I think people just don't know how to react, because a laugh doesn't just tumble out automatically after hearing one. And in that moment of awkwardness people likely groan in order to shift the embarrassment they feel from being confused in their reaction back onto the originator of the pun.

Still, while understandable, I think it's disappointing that people do that. A pun, a quality pun, is a special thing that deserves appreciation. It's your own limitation if you can't do that; the originator hardly deserves your scorn. Unless, of course, it's a stupid pun. The kind that's so awkward and contrived that it needs to be followed by an elbow to the ribs and a "Get it? Get it?" Go ahead and groan at those, because they're just stupid.

But a quality pun, an efficient package of wit, deserves a more positive reaction, like a genuine giggle upon fully appreciating what was said. It takes some sophistication on the part of the originator to be able to cull from a vocabulary of possible words just the right verbiage appropriate for the situation that can be lobbed like a stealth grenade into the listener's brain, sneaking it into their consciousness where it can then explode in a glow of realized humor. When that realization happens, a giggle - at minimum - should be the natural articulation of the tickle that it makes.

And a particularly well-timed pun should be further admired as a thing of beauty on its own. These are the puns for whom it seems there is exactly one set of circumstances in which their humor could be fully actualized. Said at any other point their brilliance would have paled. It's almost as if the pun was waiting for its moment, or that the moment was waiting for its pun, but, because it is so easy for that unification to have forever gone unrequited, when convergence is able to be achieved it's really something to savor.