Sparkler Semiotics - Driving

Hope all that are traveling for the holiday week have a safe and enjoyable trip.


Image from Epic Fireworks Blog

A Rational Discussion Flowchart for Paul Grice

This flowchart spotted on 22 Words is designed to help individuals determine whether or not they are exchanging ideas rationally.

It immediately brought to mind the cooperative principle proposed by linguist Paul Grice. This principle is based on the fact that the success of any communication depends on the cooperation of both speaker and listener. Grice's Conversational Maxims, which include maxims of quality, quantity, relevance and manner, play a large role in the cooperative principle.

It seems to me that cooperative conversation participants should be capable of having a rational discussion.

Absent Punctuation = Semantic Possibilities

Last year I shared some 6-Word Stories written by 9th graders with reading disabilities. I was recently sent another collection of these stories and would like to share one in particular.

We search so much for nothing.

Because there is no internal punctuation, my dialectical background allows me to interpret this story in two different ways.

We search so much...for nothing. (We search all the time for nothing in particular.)

and

We search...so much for nothing. (We search/ed and it wasn't worth the effort because we never found what we were searching for.)

The second reading is based on the fact that "so much for nothing" was used as an idiomatic expression in my youth. The kids in my neighborhood would shout it out anytime they were disappointed in the outcome of an action.

Go Climb a Syntax Tree

A syntactician's alternative to GO FLY A KITE.
If you would like to order this tree on a t-shirt or mug, please click here.

Rusticated From Bollywood

I sure hope the writer, director, producer and actors from 3 idiots are never suspended from the Indian film industry.


I just watched one of the best movies I have seen in...I don't even know how long. I normally get antsy watching movies that are longer than an hour an a half or so; not the case with this movie that was almost three hours short. My teenage son, while complaining about the subtitles and playing a game on his laptop, started to half-watch the movie with me and within the first five minutes he set everything aside to give it his full attention. We laughed and cried together and enjoyed every minute of this delightfully unconventional, joyfully sentimental and extremely intelligent comedy.

Here is the summary from Netflix:
While attending one of India's premier colleges, miserable engineering students and best friends Rancho (Aamir Khan), Farhan (Madhavan) and Raju (Sharman Joshi) struggle to beat their school's draconian system, which, in their eyes, unfairly values grades over creativity. Loosely based on Chetan Bhagat's best-selling novel Five Point Someone, this entertaining Bollywood comedy also stars Kareena Kapoor and Boman Irani.

rus·ti·cate
v. rus·ti·cat·ed, rus·ti·cat·ing, rus·ti·cates
v.intr.
To go to or live in the country.
v.tr.
1. To send to the country.
2. Chiefly British To suspend (a student) from a university.
3. To cut or shape (masonry blocks) so as to create a bold textured look, often by beveling the edges to form deep-set joints while leaving the central face rough-hewn or carved with various pointed or channeled patterns.

Bollywood
n
(Performing Arts) Informal
a. the Indian film industry
b. (as modifier) a Bollywood star
[from Bo(mbay) + (Ho)llywood]

Open a Can of Snowclones

A new billboard advertising campaign began appearing across Michigan in the last couple of months.

For a closer look at the campaign, here is an image from an in-store ad.


Linguistically, two things strike me about this campaign.

1. Weed is a well-known slang term for marijuana so it seems obvious that the company is aiming this product at, shall we say, an edgier crowd.

and

2. The campaign tag line is remarkably reminiscent of the idiomatic expressions, "open a can of whoop ass" and "open a can of worms", especially since the forth word in the tag line and each idiomatic expression begins with a /w/.

As to number 2 - The former idiomatic expression is in all likelihood a snowclone of the latter, and whether the tag line is an intentional snowclone of either or just a coincidence, I couldn't tell you. I will say that I sure wouldn't want my product to be associated with creating a situation that causes trouble or involves taking a beating.



P.S. A snowclone is a phrase that is produced by using a clichéd phrase as a linguistic template. Open a can of (fill in the blank).

Trending with Snowclones - X is the New Y

According to my teenage sons and via a You Tube video with the same title -

"Cone-ing is the new planking."

cone-ing: v. Ordering a soft-serve ice cream from a drive-through and picking it up by the ice cream rather than the cone.

Adorable baby - image from CBS News: What's Trending

planking: v. Lying face down, with arms at one's side in a random place an taking a photograph to share on the internet.

Read more about cone-ing here and planking here.

A Loss for Linguists and Language Learners

Just heard the sad news that the co-creator of Mad Libs, died on Tuesday. Leonard Stern may be better-known as the television writer, producer and director of shows including "The Honeymooners" and "Get Smart", but the role he played in teaching many children the parts of speech is equally, if not more, important.


I have even used Mad Libs in Introduction to Linguistics classes at the colleges where I have taught, though instead of asking for a noun I would ask for a part of speech that can be inflected for number and case; instead of a verb, a part of speech that can be inflected for tense, aspect, person and number; and so on.

Here is an excerpt from Leonard Stern's Los Angeles Times obituary that includes information on the inspiration for creating Mad Libs:

The idea for Mad Libs came to Stern and co-creator Roger Price in 1953. Stern was working on a "Honeymooners" script and was stumped for a word to describe Ralph Kramden's new boss' nose when Price dropped by.

As Stern recalled in a 2008 interview with Publishers Weekly, "I asked Roger for an idea for an adjective, and before I could tell him what it was describing, he threw out 'clumsy' and 'naked.'

"We both started laughing. We sat down and wrote a bunch of stories with blanks in them. That night we took them to a cocktail party and they were a great success."

Alex Trebek Phonetically Verbs a Noun

Is it just me or did Alex Trebek verb a noun on Tuesday evening?

When the contestants were unable to provide the question for the clue, Alex gave the response, "What is incline?"

I can't remember the exact wording of the clue, but it went something like this: "Another name for a slope leading onto or off of an expressway."

The context of the clue made it clear that "incline" was a noun ("a" is a determiner, so "slope" must be a noun; thus, incline is a noun); however, Alex gave primary stress to the second syllable of the word.
noun /ˈinˌklīn/
verb /inˈklīn/

In the above phonetic transcriptions, a raised vertical line indicates primary stress and a lowered vertical line indicates secondary stress. These phonetic markers are called suprasegmentals.

English has many noun-verb homographs. The nouns in these pairs are almost always articulated with primary stress on the first syllable, just as their verbal counterparts are articulated with primary stress on the second syllable.

Here are some additional examples of noun-verb homographs with the noun followed by the verbs.

conflict /ˈkɑn ˌflɪkt/ --- /kən ˈflɪkt/
rebel /ˈrɛ bəl/ --- /rə ˈbɛl/
permit /ˈpɚ ˌmɪt/ --- /pɚ ˈmɪt/
record /ˈrɛ kɚd/ --- /rə ˈkɔrd/

*On the other hand, maybe it is just Alex Trebek's dialect. He was born in Canada and spent much of his early life there.

Word Up Weekly - Noncondimental

I am amazed that one of my sons does not like condiments. To me, there are times when the condiment is the best part of the meal and the food is simply a condiment-delivery utensil.

At any rate, I woke up in the middle of the night recently and a word I had never heard formed in my head (I am weird like that). It seemed to be the perfect word to describe my son's affliction. The next day I googled the word to see if it had ever been used* and, if so, how it is officially defined...

There were plenty of results in the link headlines; however, when clicked upon none of them actually included definitions for the word with the prefix. Most returned a definition for the noun condiment and some added the adjective condimental, but alas, NO noncondimental. The word noncommital has its own dictionary entry, so why not noncondimental.

Add a prefix and create a word.

noncondimental
adj.
(of a person or a person's behavior) Refusing to use any items intended to enhance the flavor of food.

*Although I never found an official definition, it should be noted that I did find the word used in an online Catholic Encyclopedia.

Summer Reading - 75 Important Female Authors

In response to Esquire's "The 75 Books Every Man Should Read", which included only one book by a female author, Logophilius has just published a list of 75 female authors "whose works are just as great and just as important as any named on Esquire's list."

It is a wonderful list and I encourage everyone to check it out.

75 More Great Authors Who Could Have Made Esquire's List

What's the Frequency Pat Sajak?

The reason that Wheel of Fortune producers selected the particular letters they did to give as freebies to the winning contestant for the bonus round should come as no surprise. The five consonants and one vowel were the letters that contestants chose most frequently before the 1988 institution of the free letter bonus round scenario.


It should also come as no surprise that people would routinely choose these letters.

Based on the relative frequency of letters in English, "e" is the top ranked letter and vowel. The top consonants, in their ranked order, are "t", "n", "s", "r", "h"* and "l".

Makes me wonder why the letters appear in the order they do on Wheel of Fortune? They are not listed alphabetically or in order of frequency. Hmmm?

*Note to future contestants: Choose an "h" as one of your three consonants for the bonus round, and for the other two consonants, you may want to consider "d" and "c" which follow "l" in rank. Also, the vowel "a" is second to "e".

Here is an awesome visual reference to letter frequency that I spotted at 22 Words.



Interestingly, when comparing the relative frequency of the top seven consonant letters in English to the relative frequency of occurrence of the top seven consonant phonemes in English, there is quite a correlation.

The top seven consonant phonemes by relative frequency of occurrence are: /t/, /n/, /r/, /l/, /s/, /d/ and /z/.

The /z/ is of note because it is the phonetic realization of the plural letter "s" in many words, specifically words that end in voiced consonants and vowel phonemes, for example the words "dogs" and "goes" are phonetically transcribed as /dɔgz/ and /goz/. Additionally, words that end in the phonemes /s/, /z/, /ʃ/, /ʒ/, /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ are pluralized by inserting a schwa /ə/ and then the /z/, for example the words "kisses" and "beaches" are phonetically transcribed as /kɪsəz / and /bitʃəz /.



Letter and phoneme frequency data from "Applied Phonetics: The Sounds of American English" by Harold T. Edwards.

2011 Scripps National Spelling Bee Winning Word

Last evening Sukanya Roy, a Pennsylvania teen, won the 84th Annual Scripps National Spelling Bee by giving the correct spelling of the following word -

cymotrichous

Function: adjective
Etymology: cym- + -trichous
:having the hair wavy <a cymotrichous race>


Definition from Merriam-Webster Unabridged

Linguistics: Entertaining and Informative Mini-Lectures

I hope you enjoy these two mini-lectures with Professor Anne Curzan from the University of Michigan.

Part 1, The Word on Language and Grammar, talks about word formation, highlighting the "-ize" suffix and some of its odd results.

Part 2, The Word on Language and Grammar, gives an overview of the phonological phenomenon of metathesis, highlighting the asterisk/asteriks difference.


PART 1



PART 2


Both lectures are from the University of Michigan's LSA Wire.

Danke, Gracias, Kiitos, Merci...

All of this thanks and more goes to my readers and the wonderful people at LexioPhiles and bab.La who recognized this blog by awarding it 7th place in the Top 25 Language Professionals Blogs 2011 (out of 100 nominated blogs). I am among esteemed company as can be seen by this word cloud that appears on the bab.La site.

Additionally, this blog placed 43rd in the combined categories for the Top 100 Language Lovers 2011 competition. The four categories (Language Learning Blogs, Language Professionals Blogs, Facebook Pages and Twitterers) had a total of 500 nominations.

For those who are curious, here are a few details about the ranking and results from the LexioPhiles site:

Ranking & Results (May 30th – June 1st)
All the competitors will be ranked based on user votes (50%) and the Lexiophiles ranking criteria (50%, see below). We will then compile the top 100 overall language lovers list and the top 25 list for each of the four categories. Results will be published on June 1st. Each blogger/Facebook page admin/twitterer will be contacted when the results are published.

What are the Lexiophiles ranking criteria?
Every competitor will be analyzed and ranked by our staff. Even though we know that no ranking system is 100% accurate and always somewhat subjective, we feel that the following criteria give a good overall view of how good a blog, or a Facebook page, or a Twitter account is.

Learning & Professionals Blogs: We look for authored and original content, considering the depth of postings, the incorporation of multimedia (such as videos, pictures, slideshows etc.) and meaningful linking (e.g. in-depth information for further reading, background information, interesting opinions on a subject, etc.). Interaction is also very important, i.e. sharing information and getting other people involved. The most observable feature is comments, but it doesn’t stop there: can users contact the blogger via a contact page, Facebook or similar? We also take into consideration the regularity and frequence of updating, and, finally, the overall appearance of the blog.

Again, barkalla, mahalo, grazie, tanggio and more thank yous.

Language and Nutrition

Language humor from an e-mail -

For those of you who watch what you eat, here's the final word on nutrition and health. It's a relief to know the truth after all those conflicting nutritional studies.

1. The Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans.

2. The Mexicans eat a lot of fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans.

3. The Chinese drink very little red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans.

4. The Italians drink a lot of red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans..

5. The Germans drink a lot of beer and eat lots of sausages and fats and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans.

CONCLUSION:

Eat and drink what you like. Speaking English is apparently what kills you.