language
I’m starting to get a little bit worried about the rash of strangely written and borderline grammatically incorrect advertising slogans in the media. This is especially true of fast food advertisements. The slogan that bothers me the most is McDonald’s “i’m lovin’ it.” I understand how dropping the g makes the slogan less impersonal and more relaxed, but the lowercase i really irks me. What’s the point?
Other celebrated and effective examples include Apple’s classic “Think different,” and their more recent description of the new iPod touch as “The funnest iPod ever.” Even the Obama campaign’s “Change we can believe in” ends in a preposition.
The worst thing about these slogans is that the television viewing public is exposed to them on a daily basis. Many of these slogans are not necessarily incorrect, but they violate several rules we try to teach our students in efforts to improve the clarity and effectiveness of their oral and written communication. I can’t help but wonder about the extent to which these slogans are negatively impacting the communication skills of the viewing public. The advertising industry seems to be on a mission to legitimize incorrectness.
I’m currently teaching an English course whose main learning objective is to improve written and oral communication skills of international students. Basically this translates into ESL instruction. In fact, the school puts tremendous emphasis on ‘correctness.’ I try to incorporate a grammar component into almost every written and oral assignment. At this point, despite the fact that we have spent the first 4 weeks on most fundamental topics – subject verb agreement, run-ons, fragments, and sentence structure – my students are making egregious numbers of mistakes in their papers. I certainly understand that they’re grappling with lots of new issues on both compositional and grammatical levels, and, as the semester progresses, they’ll gradually become better equipped to discern their errors. But I wonder what can I do as an instructor to help them get to this place sooner?
So far, I have tried to vary our contexts for discussing grammar. I select sentences from their papers and we correct them as a big group; sometimes they do the same in small groups. The traditional technique of giving a lecture/presentation followed by in-class exercises is another method I tried, especially because I know that many of these students are used to this type of instruction. So, I try to make it easier for them to process new information in this familiar way. I have also assigned an error log, and of course they’re responding to each other’s writing, paying particular attention to grammar and usage.
I still wonder if there are other effective ways to teach grammar. Suggestions would be much appreciated.
Keeping my notes findable: Rmutt on MacOSX will build cleanly if you change the CC line in the Makefile to be:
CC = gcc -arch x86_64
That is all. For those who haven’t tried it, Rmutt is a grammar-based nonsense generator along the lines of the Dada Engine (see also Web version). The Dada Engine powers the near-legendary Postmodernism Generator, though I’m lately thinking about putting these kinds of tools into a hosted (openid/wiki etc) environment where people could collaboratively build up shared grammars.
Communication is not exactly the MTA’s forte. Between their signature garbled announcements (what’s the next stop?) to the impossibility of communicating across the vast gulf between the MTA booth worker and the puzzled tourist yelling helplessly at the glass, when they do communicate something (anything!) well, it’s cause for some serious celebration. Even the notoriously goofy advertisements on the trains (Dr. Zizmore joke, anyone?) serve as continual reminders of botched opportunities to reach the diverse train-riding audience while making substantial revenue– how many times have you seen empty ad space on our broken-down subway cars?
To make matters worse, the MTA has also been slightly slow on the uptake when it comes to wielding technology to the best of their advantage, which is why it’s perhaps no surprise that their latest stab—the new digital screens in some updated subway cars—already seem to be malfunctioning perfectly (according to my own admittedly informal survey of new train cars, that is).
And which is also why it’s interesting that something so simple manages to communicate so much: the train lines & representative letters themselves have incredible expressive power for many New Yawkers. Initially, when someone forwarded me the recent article in the Observer about the perceived changing desirability of certain train lines, I had to let out a small groan; anyone who’s interested in the brand-ification of NY neighborhoods has seen and been frustrated by this kind of article before– a few random quotes from random folks strung together to try to create a coherent snapshot of a neighborhood in supposedly wild flux.
The biggest problem I see with most of these articles is that their discussion of New York history seems to cover on average about three years, give or take a few months. As some irate comments to the article noted, New Yorkers who can recall when the Q wasn’t the Q or the R wasn’t the R look upon this obsession with particular train lines with bemusement. I grew up listening to my parents refer to subway lines by their old-school avenues, which I always found odd-sounding: “Did you take the IRT there?” “Doesn’t the 7th Avenue line stop there?” (Whaaa?) The Observer article engages in its own short-sighted historicism, looking all the way back to the roaring ‘00s to declare the Q the new L; eh?
I wonder if coveting a Chosen Train Line with static, starry-eyed love serves to cut down on the level of advocacy for better and more functioning trains across the board, or if it instead creates a neighbor more rooted in and concerned about where they live. The urge to want a transportation arrangement that is convenient, safe, and reliable is natural, but there seems to be something else at play here. What is it about the process of attributing status to certain subway letters/lines that feels like another lame fetish of the me-me-me-and-also-me generation?
I’ve sat through numerous student presentations (often by international students) who are shocked to discover upon arriving that our subway system looks like the old, neglected bohemoth that it is. A comparative analysis of the Hong Kong subway system, say, or the St. Petersburg subway, versus ours, is an embarrassing enterprise to be sure. I have the impulse to be protective of our train stations, to defend the long history that has made them what they are, and yet there’s something in the logic of these presentations that I can’t argue with. I sat in a shiny new Q car the other day, and couldn’t stop staring up at the broken screen above me that was promising that 34th Street would be the next stop– after we had already past 34th Street twenty minutes before and were hurtling towards Coney Island. Indeed, the MTA has given the very fabulous Q very fabulous new train cars and yet still can’t figure out where we’re headed.
Yeah, I’m on the Facebook. I resisted for some time, but being able to play Scrabble (or, more accurately, “Scrabulous”) with friends ultimately got me. I’ve developed a bond with the husband of a college friend of my sister-in-law, forged initially through comments on the baby blogosphere, but secured ultimately through online word games played on Facebook. We’ve met only twice. The first time was before our online friendship blossomed. The second was at a party a few weeks ago. We were both a little nervous, but happy to see each other. I joked that we met on “Bromatch.com.” We haven’t played a game in a while, and I just heard from my sister in-law last week that he misses me. Scrabulous challenge forthcoming….
Apart from Facebook’s support for connectedness and competitive word twisting, the site allows users to issue “status” updates whenever they want. This is a delicate but powerful art form. I’ve encountered the following kinds of updates:
Literal: “Luke is working on a blog post”
Self-promoting: “Luke just published this: http://cac.ophony.org/2008/07/24/status-anxiety/”
Philosophical: “Luke is”
Frustrated: “Luke is, but perhaps not according to Human Resources”
Resigned: “Luke isn’t”
Ironic: “Luke’s productivity is unaffected by the distractions of Facebook”
Literary (direct quote): “Luke is under the brown fog of a winter dawn”
Literary (reference): “Luke thinks the only thing keeping him visible is his whiteness”
Historical: “Luke thinks the run on Indymac echoes the Panic of 1893″
Informed: “Luke just got run over by Bob Novak”
Uninformed: “Luke thinks McCain is being too heavily scrutinized by the press”
Anticipatory: “Luke is looking forward to the new season of Mad Men”
Anguished: “Luke keeps writing the same &%#(*&@ sentence over and over again!”
Confessional: “Luke watched Steel Magnolias last night, and is still crying”
Curious: “Luke wonders how many kinds of status updates there are”
Evangelical: “Luke thinks there will never, ever, ever be anything like The Wire on TV again”
Nerdy: “Luke is a csstud and a phpimp”
Political: “Luke is chanting No Justice, No Peace”
Supportive: “Luke thinks that no matter what (redacted)’s dissertation adviser says, the work is top-notch”
Onomatopoeic: “Luke thump thump thumped three miles at the track” (that one is also alliterative)
Swinging: “Luke is be-bop-be-dee-bop”
Sporting: “Luke is yelling ‘Go Green’”
Stumped, Disinterested, or Over Forty: ” ”
Of course, there are other ways to announce your status, or lack thereof, to the world. There’s Twitter, which gives you 140 characters to say what you’re up to (”microblogging,” they call it). There’s the status menu feature of an instant messaging client. There’s all sorts of ways to unify these statuses, to change them on the fly; or you can choose to keep them separate.
Yet, I imagine the following uttered in the border-state twang of a dear BLSCI comrade: “who cares? I don’t want to know what you’re doing, and I don’t want you to know what I’m doing.” Of course not. A status update is not really a status update, but rather a chance to blast your friends with a small dose of personality to break up the monotony of the day. It’s fun, it’s a challenge to be creative, and it’s a chance to stay connected with a community.
Editor’s note: in advance of this weekend’s U.S. Open, this is the second in a series of posts exploring the metaphorical relationship between golf and writing.
One of the enduring paradoxes of golf as played by amateurs is the huge and hugely disproportionate emphasis placed on the drive. That’s the first shot on a hole, hit off a tee instead of from the grass, with the biggest, longest club in the bag. It is a powerful feeling, and often looks great too, when you smack a ball way, way down the fairway just where you wanted it, bringing a sense of satisfaction that must somehow be tied up with the primal urge to demonstrate one’s physical prowess to other would-be alpha males. Of course, most drives, even ones that go far, do not go far in the right direction. And when the monster-drive-that-almost-was ends up in the woods or in three-inch long grass, you’ve hurt yourself far more with your strong-man indulgences than if you’d have sacrificed distance for accuracy. These indisputable facts, however, seem to have approximately zero effect on the minds of most amateur golfers. As I write there are thousands of (mostly) men wasting $200-300 on drivers whose heads (the part that hits the ball) are almost exactly the same size (at 460 cm3) as a pint glass.
In the end, golf is a game of less-than-inches. About half of the normal hacker’s shots will actually take place on or around the green (the short grass where the hole is) when the ball is probably less than twenty yards from the cup. And thus the timeless phrase, “Drive for show, putt for dough.” (A variant I think I actually prefer was suggested to me by Tom: “It’s not how you drive, it’s how you arrive.”) When you need to hit the ball just 20 yards (a chip) or roll it just 10 feet (a putt) what happens is not only more difficult, but much more important than the drive. Only dedicated practice can yield even occasional success when faced with greenside subtleties. Many times I have played golf with old men – really old, not middle aged – who just tap the ball down each fairway while my pals and I are wailing away from the tee and then trudging into the woods in search of an uncooperative ball (which we will then of course try to hit as hard as possible from under a rock, giving in again to the Siren song of the heroic). At the end of the round, we find that the eighty-year-old has shot his age while we’ve stumbled into the unsatisfactory upper-nineties. The difference is that we have cool clubs and he has a good swing. We have a giant dictionary and updated thesaurus on our desk, if you will, but he knows how to write.
The point is: do sweat the small stuff – which brings me to writing. Mark Twain addressed this point when he said something like “The difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” I still (cringingly) remember writing “poems” in middle school classes and figuring that the more multi-syllabic adjectives I could shove into the description of something the better. Good poetry must mean using superficially intense, longish words right? This was not unlike equating your golf prowess with your expensive, grotesquely large driver: an attempted shortcut that usually yields really embarrassing results. To get good at using metaphor a never-ending, effort. To craft a truly clear and useful sentence can ultimately take hours. Whether at its more basic levels (making sure you have an antecedent for a pronoun, subject-verb agreement) or in the mysterious and elusive quest for a meritorious style, what matters is not the flashy phrasing but the effective communication of your worthwhile perceptions, ideally in a way that effects or informs your reader in salutary ways. A golf shot starts with envisioning exactly how and where you intend the ball to fly or roll. A piece of writing begins with envisioning what information you want to convey. The good shot and the good essay are thus both instances of successful translation, and neither comes easy, and neither can be purchased.
(Another crazy and endearing thing about golf – though not so much like writing – is that the best professionals sometimes make very stupid, very costly mistakes. Read about an infamous instance.
Occasionally, the associations of a particular word become more powerful than its meaning. For me and many others studying social media, the word community is just such an example. In general, the word community is a sociological term; it is used in reference to the study and classification of human socities. The term dates back to the 14th century from the Old French communité, from the Latin communitatem/communitas meaning "fellowship" and a "community of relations or feelings," which is also directly connected to the term communis, meaning "common, public, general, shared by all or many" (see common).
It's a large, umbrella-like term that can range in scale from groups of people to groups of nations. It can refer to a society at large, a common character (as in a community of interest), and as a social activity (see community of practice). Groups sizes and participation within communities ranges from small to large, with many large communities being sustained by the efforts of a small groups residing within in them. Again, this simple illustration points to the complexity inherent in the term.
What threads together the wide range of definitions of community is the notion of likeness, a shared commonality, a tie that binds people or groups of people together.
In her article Blogs as Virtual Communities: Identifying a Sense of Community in the Julie/Julia Project, Anita Blanchard cites a definition of virtual community that seeks to differentiate a virtual community from a virtual settlements from a sense of community (Blanchard, 2004). Several of Blanchard's sources for the definition of a virtual community try to affix them with the same characteristics as concrete ones, ignoring the affordances of social software (which, to be fair, was still in early stages of development when they were probably conducting their research in the mid-to-late 1990s).
With the ridiculously easy group forming capabilities ushered in by the Read/Write Web, the use of the term community has spread even wider and farther. The term is used so broadly that it sometimes feels like it can apply to practically any group or grouping of people. But that's not quite right either. For example, Shirky (2008) notes, "an audience isn't just a big community; it can be more anonymous, with many fewer ties among users. A community isn't just a small audience either; it has a social density that audiences lack" (p.85). On the Web, however, the elasticity of our handy term is once again put to test.
Now here's where things get a bit dicy. Shirky (2008) points out that Read/Write tools provide a platform that makes every webpage a "latent community" (p 102). He elaborates:
"Each page collects the attention of people interested in its contents, and those people might well be interested in conversing with one another, too. In almost all cases the community will remain latent, either because the potential ties are too weak (any two users of Google are not likely to have much else in common) or because the people looking at the page are separated by too wide a gulf of time, and so on" (p. 102).
This is quite a peculiar, yet equally intriguing notion of community. Each webpage serves as a virtual space that can potentially unite people by serving a common interest. In essence, the Read/Write Web provides a new space for people to settle, commune, share, and cooperate.
What this suggests is that more people now have the ability to communicate and tie into to one another than ever before. We are witnessing the restructuring of organizational structures and the management of information on a scale never before heard of. As Shirky (2008) again points out,"any radical change in our ability to communicate with one another changes society" (p. 106). But here's the part that Shirky adds that also allows us to see things differently:
"Communication tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring" (p. 105).
In other words, it's not the invention of the tool that holds value; it's the tool's ubiquitousness that contains the value which ultimately leads to profound social changes.
Similarly, the tools that support virtual communities probably won't be very interesting until they become invisible, everyday components in our lives. For some, this is already the case and as such we are beginning to see new and powerful means to share, commune, and identify with one another. For example, I have found a simple tool like Twitter has allowed to both collapse and expand my professional and personal networks whether I am at work, on a plane, at my desk, or on the beach. Such a powerful little application that limits my choices but by doing so allows me a tremendous amount of freedom to connect, share, and cooperate within its boundaries.
So while I pretended to desire a limited use of the term community, in reality, I like the fact that the term resists fixity. To paraphrase Victor Hugo, when a language becomes fixed, the human intellect also becomes fixed. While there are degrees of fixedness in language which allows us to function in a state of seeming normalcy, the dividing line between elasticity and fixity in a language is never usually easy to determine. Likewise, the need to limit our current definition of virtual community could potentially limit its potential range of meaning and applicability.
For the most part, it is fair to say communities exist in some form or another across societies, and that they all share such similarities as membership, boundaries, norms, forms of exchange, and often shared emotional connections (Blanchard, 2004). With the introduction of social media, the term community now equals a mix of social and technological factors that should continue to evolve and adapt over time.
References:
Blanchard, A. (2004). Blogs as Virtual Communities: Identifying a Sense of Community in the Julie/Julia Project. In L.J. Gurak, S. Antonijevic, L. Johnson, C. Ratliff, & J. Reyman (Eds.), Into the blogosphere: Rhetoric, community, and culture of weblogs. Retrieved 28 April 2008 from http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/blogs_as_virtual.html.
Shirky, C. (2008). Here comes everybody: The power of organizing without organizations. New York: Penguin Press.
I go back to visit Japan quite often lately (2-3 times/year), and yet every time I am back I am just amused by how the cellphone technology is rapidly advancing there. Now you can watch TV in those cellphones, which even don’t cost much to get.
As text messaging is also very common there and even my own mother (60+) now sends her friends long messages full of emoticons (serious), I wondered whether educators over there talk about the side effects of those advancements on people’s language (especially writing) skills as people here do. And what I noticed is, whereas I do hear about people blaming computers (Internet and e-mail) affecting people’s abilities to write well, they don’t necessarily blame cell phone messaging. Why is that?
As I communicated with my friends using my father’s cellphone while I was there, I noticed something. No one abbreviates common words (e.g. from the ‘where r u?’ type to ‘LOL’ and all that) like people here do to save on typing effort, not because Japanese people are more consciencious but because of a feature with the input software common with any phone. Very roughly speaking, basically what it does is when you type the first letter of a word (say ‘b’) the phone provides a list of possible continuations automatically (is that ‘be’, ‘best’, ‘blue’…?) and all you have to do is to choose what you need from there. Of course if what you want is not there, you can choose to ignore the list and keep typing letters. Even better, the phone remembers what you wanted from a certain beginning and offers those first when you type the same letter the next time (’You wanted ‘beautiful’ the other time. Do you want to say it again?’). This way, there is no need to make much effort to compose a nice long text message in Japanese. I don’t think I had to type a word in full when I was there the last time.
Of course, I am simplifying the story and this is not a unique feature with the cellphone technology (this tool has a long history going back to the days of word processors because of the characteristics of the Japanese writing system), but I was amused by this little realization. If more cellphones here had this function, would it have prevented some students from forgetting to spell out what ‘r’ or ‘u’ stand for in their essays?
Stephanie Booth asks:
I vaguely remember somebody telling me about some emerging “standard” (too big a word) for encoding language skills. Or was it a dream?
That would’ve been me, showing markup from the FOAFX beta from Paola Di Maio and friends, which explores the extension of FOAF with expertise information. This is part of the ExpertFinder discussions alongside the FOAF project (see also wiki, mailing list). FOAFX and the ExpertFinder community are looking at ways of extending FOAF to better describe people’s expertise; both self-described and externally accredited. This is at once a fascinating, important and terrifyingly hard to scope problem area. It touches on longstanding “Web of trust” themes, on educational metadata standards, and on the various ways of characterising topics or domains of expertise. In other words, in any such problem space, there will always be multiple ways of “doing it”. For example, here is how the Advogato community site characterises my expertise regarding opensource software: foaf.rdf (I’m in the Journeyer group, apparently; some weighted average of people’s judgements about me).
One thing FOAFX attempts is to describe language skills. For this, they extend the idiom proposed by Inkel some years ago in his “Speaks, Reads, Writes” schema. In the original (which is Spanish, but see also English version), the classification was effectively binary: one could either speak, read, or write a language; or one couldn’t. You could also say you ‘mastered’ it, meaning that you could speak, read and write it. In FOAFX, this is handled differently: we get a 1-5 score. I like this direction, as it allows me to express that I have some basic capability in Spanish, without appearing to boast that I’m anything like “fluent”. But … am I a “1″ or a “2″? Should I poll my long-suffering Spanish-speaking friends? Take an online quiz? Introducing numbers gives the impression of mathematical precision, but in skill characterisation this is notoriously hard (and not without controversy).
My take here is that there’s no right thing to do. So progress and experimentation are to be celebrated, even if the solution isn’t perfect. On language skills, I’d love some way also to allow people to say “I’m learning language X”, or “I’m happy to help you practice your English/Spanish/Japanese/etc.”. Who knows, with more such information available, online Social Network sites could even prove useful…
Here btw is the current RDF markup generated by FOAFX:
<foaf:Person rdf:ID="me"> <foaf:mbox_sha1>6e80d02de4cb3376605a34976e31188bb16180d0</foaf:mbox_sha1> <foaf:givenname>Dan</foaf:givenname> <foaf:family_name>Brickley</foaf:family_name> <foaf:homepage rdf:resource="http://danbri.org/" /> <foaf:weblog rdf:resource="http://danbri.org/words/" /> <foaf:depiction rdf:resource="http://danbri.org/images/me.jpg" /> <foaf:jabberID>danbrickley@gmail.com</foaf:jabberID> <foafx:language> <foafx:Language> <foafx:name>English</foafx:name> <foafx:speaking>5</foafx:speaking> <foafx:reading>5</foafx:reading> <foafx:writing>5</foafx:writing> </foafx:Language> </foafx:language> <foafx:language> <foafx:Language> <foafx:name>Spanish</foafx:name> <foafx:speaking>1</foafx:speaking> <foafx:reading>1</foafx:reading> <foafx:writing>1</foafx:writing> </foafx:Language> </foafx:language> <foafx:expertise> <foafx:Expertise> <foafx:field>::</foafx:field> <foafx:fluency> <foafx:Language> <foafx:name>English</foafx:name> </foafx:Language> </foafx:fluency> </foafx:Expertise> </foafx:expertise> </foaf:Person>
The apparent redundancy in the markup (expertise, Expertise) is due to RDF’s so-called “striped” syntax. I have an old introduction to this idea; in short, RDF lets you define properties of things, and categories of thing. The FOAFX design effectively says, “there is a property of a person called “expertise” which relates that person to another thing, an “Expertise”, which itself has properties like “fluency”.
The FOAFX design tries to navigate between generic and specific, by including language-oriented markup as well as more generic skill descriptions. I think this is probably the right way to go. There are many things that we can say about human languages that don’t apply to other areas of expertise (eg. opensource software development). And there many things we can say about expertise in general (like expressions of willingness to learn, to teach, … indications of formal qualification) which are cross domain. Similarly, there are many things we might say in markup about opensource projects (picking up on my Advogato mention earlier) which have nothing to do with human languages. Yet both human language expertise and opensource skills are things we might want to express via FOAF extensions. For example, the DOAP project already lets us describe opensource projects and our roles in them.
The Semantic Web design challenge here is to provide a melting pot for all these different kinds of data, one that allows each specific problem to be solved adequately in a reasonable time-frame, without precluding the possibility for richer integration at a later date. I have a hunch that the Advogato design, which expresses skills in terms of group membership, could be a way to go here.
This is related to the idea of expressing group-membership criteria through writing SPARQL queries. For example, we can talk about the Group of people who work for W3C. Or we can talk about the Group of people who work for W3C as listed authoritatively on the W3C site. Both rules are expressible as queries; the latter a query that says things about the source of claims, as well as about what those claims assert. This notion of a group defined by a query allows for both flavours; the definition could include criteria relating to the provenance (ie. source) of the claims, but it needn’t. So we could express the idea of people who speak Spanish, or the idea of people who speak french according to having passed some particular test, or being certified by some agency. In either case, the unifying notion is “person X is in group Y”, where Y is a group identified by some URL. What I like about this model, is it allows for a very loose division of labour: skill-related markup is necessarily going to be widely varied. Yet the idea that such scattered evidence boils down to people falling into definable groups, gives some overall cohesion to this diversity. I could for example run a query asking for people with (foafx idiom) “Spanish skills of 2 or more”. I could add a constraint that the person be at least a “Journeyer” regarding their opensource skills, according to Advogato, or perhaps mix in data expressed in DOAP terms regarding their roles in opensource project work. These skills effectively define groups (loosly, sets) of people, and skill search can be pictured in venn diagram terms. Of course all this depends on getting enough data out there for any such queries to be worthwhile. Maybe a Facebook app that re-published data outside of Hotel Facebook would be a way of bootstrapping things here?
Sometimes I think that being a linguist (or a language teacher) justifies my act of nit-picking at what I see written in public places. Not that it is a good thing, because most probably what I cannot help but ‘nit-pick’ illustrates another case of ‘non-standard’, if not ‘wrong’, use of English, which makes me either sigh or picture some people getting started on that same old ‘correctness’ issue again.
Then, today I came across this article on this poster I was staring at a few hours ago, which made me smile. For once, someone does something right and gets yays from some sticklers (such as Lynne Truss). And Bush somehow gets a sniff from Chomsky (again?).
Also look here and here for what some linguists are saying about this…
