Noncompositional

This morning I was watching some shows on the Food Network, and since I simply can’t pay attention to language, I noticed a couple of interesting linguistic treats that a couple of the hosts did.

First, on one show Calorie Commando, the host Juan-Carlos Cruz) was creating a low-calorie and low-fat version of potato latkes that did not contain potatoes but zucchini and summer squash. As he got to the part where he talks about how important texture is in cooking, he said

The ‘T’ in ‘taste’ stands for ‘texture.’

I took a double-take at that one - you’d think that the x that is the initial letter in [word] stands for [word]. I suppose this is like the ‘P’ in pool that rhymes with ‘T’ that stands for ‘trouble.’ (Though I suppose if Harold Hill said The ‘T’ in ‘trouble’ stands for the word whose initial rhymes with ‘T,’ that is ‘pool’, he wouldn’t have got much scamming done.) But in all seriousness (that stands for silly), the practice of associating words by their initial letters is an interesting one, as is the larger association of attributing significance to spellings of certain words for rhetorical effect (there’s no ‘I’ in ‘team’, and so on). I wonder if something similar happens in Chinese languages, either with pronunciations or radicals. I’m fairly sure that this sort of thing is done in Japanese, but I can’t bring any examples to mind.

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A recent story on CNN’s The Turnaround, a show about business owners trying to take their businesses to the next level, featured an LA area caterer who lost her sisters and mother to sickness and now is devoted to charity work. One particular line in the narration caught my ear:

She devotes much of her time to charity - not outside her work hours, but during them - because Emma often caters to those who can’t pay full price.

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Teaching Linguistics

Way back in March of 2004, in the first issue of the 40th volume of the Journal of Linguistics (article link for those with access), an article by Richard Hudson (but everyone calls him “Dick”) appeared entitled “Why education needs linguistics (and vice versa).” Those without access to the journal’s online archives can download the article in RTF here).Hudson neatly summarizes much of the work done by linguists in the UK to encourage the use of linguistics in pre-university curricula, and makes positive noises indicating that in the future schools will have linguistically-informed language and literature courses. He goes on to discuss why linguistics needs education, but he means something different by “education” in that part of the paper, so I’ll go over that later.

First, however, he says something that I wasn’t aware of, namely:

On the other hand is an equally long philosophical tradition of ‘pure’ scholarship for its own sake, in which the only motivation was a desire to understand language better. Recently this tradition is most clearly represented by two linguists who otherwise have little in common, Sampson (1980) and Chomsky (Olson, Faigley & Chomsky 1991), both of whom have denied that linguistics has, can have or indeed should have any relevance to language teaching.

Interesting. A footnote quotes the Olson et al. paper: “Maybe that [professional linguistic] training just doesn’t help you to be useful to other people. In fact, it doesn’t.” That’s quite a statement. I’d like to think that training in linguistics makes me at least a little helpful to at least one person in the world. Perhaps I should give up on that dream, though.

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As a short followup to my earlier ponderings regarding what a secret is and the different ways in which one can accidentally reveal one, a short entry on how having various viewpoints can enable the speaker to see what she has done as accidental or not. If for instance, imagine the situation where Susan tells her friend Ralph all about her friend Tony’s crush on their chemistry professor (for instance), mistakenly thinking that Ralph already knew the secret (or, alternatively, thinking that the particular piece of information was not really a secret at all but common knowledge). Susan could take the perspective of Tony and say that she revealed the secret by accident, or she could close off that option and only talk about “not knowing it was a secret” or “thinking Ralph already knew.” On the other hand, Ralph is likely to see this as accidentally letting the cat out of the bag. He could lament, Susan accidentally blabbed by secret to Ralph, or Susan accidentally told Ralph all about my crush on the teacher. (However, the sequence Susan told Ralph that I liked our chem professor. But it was an accident seems a little odd, only because it leaves wide open the possibility that the actual telling was accidental, i.e., a slip of the tongue, rather than the revelation per se being accidental).

I’m still finding it very hard thinking about what an accident exactly is, and how to talk about what it means to reveal a secret by telling someone exactly the content of that secret, in terms of intentionality and assumptions about interlocutor knowledge.

Up next: a little discussion on Richard Hudson’s article in a 2004 issue of Journal of Linguistics on the fields of education and linguistics.

Let’s talk about secrets, and more specifically, about revealing secrets. A secret is some piece of information known to some individual or group, which that group (or some subgroup of it) wants to remain unknown to those who do not know it. To keep a secret is to not tell any unknowing soul the information. To reveal a secret is to tell someone who doesn’t know the secret about it - or is it? Well, here are some possibilities:

• telling someone you know knows the information
• telling someone you know doesn’t know
• telling someone who you aren’t sure if they know

The last two are probably revealing a secret. The first might get you a reprimand (Don’t just go around babbling that to anyone! What if I hadn’t known…, for instance), or it might just be a normal activity. Depends on the secretive group.

Now, what would it mean to accidentally reveal the secret? (hint: see post title) Well, it probably means that you told the secret to someone who didn’t know the information carelessly, by a slip of the tongue, as it were. You may or may not have known that the person knew the information. And, importantly for this discussion, as soon as you realize that you uttered that information, you realize your error.

Ah, but there’s a whole other set of possibilities if we consider the possibility that you don’t realize that some piece of information is a secret. First possibility: your friend tells you some information intended to be a secret, but you figure it’s already common knowledge. Say your friend told you that she was going to join the Navy, and so you figure that this information is widely known, if not among her other friends than at least among her immediate family. But you’re in luck, because your friend hasn’t told anyone else yet (what a good friend you must be, then). So, you bring it up in conversation with her parents (So, now that your daughter is leaving college to join the Navy…), and only then, when the parents are {raging mad / unconscious on the floor / whatever}, do you realize your mistake. Your utterance of the secret was made perfectly intentionally, with specific goals in mind, though importantly you assumed it was common knowledge when you uttered it. The question is: did you do anything accidentally?

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Completely relaxed and refreshed, I return to the blogging world. I am not, however, not armed to the teeth with fun linguistic material to post about. Hey, that’s why it’s called a vacation — (oblink to LL [thanks Tensor]) — I don’t have to remember or write down all the cool stuff that my linguistics-trained brain automatically picks up. But as it happens, I do have some material. So here it is, in list-ish form (since, I must admit, despite getting around 10 hours of sleep, I’m still as tired as [expletive] [slightly-more-provocative expletive] shit).

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It’s summer, so that means I get to not work, not think, not do anything except play. And hopefully I’ll approach that state over the next several days as I travel to a houseboat on a lake in a remote part of the faraway reaches of what some call, in hushed voices and darting eyes, the place…uh…where it’s not the city and…uh, you don’t have to work…place…thing.

As a parting shot, check out Overheard in New York. It’s like In Passing, only somewhere else. My personal favorite on the front page is this collection. Scroll down to second from the last one, and marvel at the phenomenon called language.

Present-day communications technology has enabled people around the world to connect with each other and exchange useful information. In particular, the web has become a great source of information for many a person seeking a quick knowledge fix. But it has some rather obscure, and remarkable uses. Today I will reveal one such use: transportation.

Yes, there are many map services out there, but did you know that now the Internet will actually transport you to your destination? No? Well, I recommend looking at this site. Yes indeed, you can get to the festival site merely by using the internet. It’s amazing. I hope to try this contraption out as soon as possible.