Interesting Things I Learned Last Week

I'll try and post some interesting nuggets gleaned from my renewed education each week. This is the first post of such nuggets.

• Ironic: The American whaling industry is partly responsible for encouraging America to engage in trade with Japan--having drained the Atlantic of whales, Americans wanted access to Pacific oceans and the oil within them. Now, American whale protectors lambast Japan for its whaling practices and even ram their boats into whaling vessels.
  
  
• In German, they call Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally and other such mnemonic devices Eselsbrücke or a "donkey-bridge." Such a more colorful expression than "mnemonic device."
  
  
• Japanese Noh theatre is 600 years old. It is called by some "the art of walking." I understand this completely: the way the actors walk is slow, methodical, and really beautiful. I wish this picture of mine did it justice:
  

• As for Kabuki, the guy with red makeup is the hero, the guy with indigo makeup the villain. Color-coded.
  
  
• I found out it's easy to rent Japanese VHS tapes from Daruma Market in Bethesda, but you need to pay $10 to get a member's card. I feel like I'm betraying Hinata, though...

I guess I'll need to keep a list of interesting things I learn, so as not to overwhelm my poor readers with Japanese trivia.

Shhhhhh

Today in linguistics class, I learned about a difference in the Japanese pronunciation of "sh" and our American pronunciation of "sh".

It's difficult to describe in words, and I can't find good examples online. The Japanese "sh" is tighter, efficient. The American makes "sh" with a less-tense mouth and a lot more air against the teeth. The Japanese version makes your tongue's tip point down as the air becomes strained between the palate and the high-point bump of the folded-down tongue. The American version, the tip of our tongue is higher and kind of rounded, funneling air against and through the teeth.

(I'm using layman's terms above. You don't really want to know the technical terms for these kinds of articulations.)

It's not an important difference, meaning that the meaning with be clear to either Japanese or American if you use the wrong "sh."

When the teacher mentioned this, though, the whole class was kind of astounded. They, like I, had always heard the slight difference, but they'd been unable to pinpoint what made the sh-sounds different. So, for the next five minutes, the teacher continued to speak, but everyone in the class was going "Shhhh, shhhh."

Things I Learned from My Linguistics Class

• The UN in UNHAPPY is morphologically different from the UN in UNLOCK.
  
  HAPPY = happy
  UNHAPPY = not happy
  
  LOCK = to fasten, to secure (with a lock)
  UNLOCK = to UNDO the fastening of (a lock)
  
  So UN plus an adjective means the opposite of that adjective, but UN plus a verb means to revert back to the state before that verb was done. You can't UNDO something unless it was already done.
  
  
• There is confusion among twenty-year-olds about the past tense of the euphemism for "to ejaculate." Some think the verb is "to come" and therefore the past tense is "came". Others argue vehemently that it is "to cum" and the past tense is "cummed."
  
  I think the noun form can be spelled "cum" and the verb form "come," and I see no reason why the past tense shouldn't be "came." Furthermore, the Japanese slang word is "iku," which means "go," and I like the contrast of Western "coming" and Eastern "going."
  

There are certain uncouth words that should, by now, be standardized into dictionaries: "cum" and "jizz" for example. Mainly because I want to use them in Scrabble.

Word Debate

As long as we're brabbling, please allow me to initiate a conversation here on Hatandcoat. If you've ever been in a grammar argument, or if you've ever insisted that some people don't know how to speak their own language, you are already part of the debate. So don't roll your eyes at this post, Dear Reader, for it may well give you ammunition for your next grammar/definition showdown.

On Christmas Eve, a friend of mine brought up the American Heritage Dictionary's "usage problem" with the way people now use the word "fortuitous." In a nutshell, the word only originally meant "happening by random chance or accident." Since the 1920s, though, people have confused it with "fortunate" and "felicitous" and thus exclusively used it to mean "lucky, a good accident." If you said the following sentence, hardly anyone would think it's wrong:

In a fortuitous turn of events, I found a $100 bill in my pocket.

But if you were to say the following, people would give you the stinkeye:

In a fortuitous turn of events, I stepped in dog feces.

If you insisted that that was an accurate usage of the word, they would probably tell you that "fortuitous" means "lucky."*

I thanked my friend for the tidbit. I love these little problem words. And I love knowing the history of the word and the evolution of its meaning. But I didn't bother to get into the boring argument that I usually get into with these kinds of word problems. That argument is PRESCRIPTIVISM VS DESCRIPTIVISM.

Prescriptivists, in the linguistic domain, are those who believe that there are rules for a language. That there is an ideal language that we follow grammar rules to match as closely as we can. That there is a wrong way to speak and a right way to speak.

Descriptivists are those who believe that language is in flux, that there are no rules as long as the speaker and listener both understand what is going on, and that there's no right and wrong, there's only communication and miscommunication.

The problem with prescriptivists is that the grammar rules they learned in school were just the product of one or two prescriptivists who wrote books in the 18th or 19th century. The educational system picked those books and based lessons on them. Split infinitives, prepositions at the ends of sentences, etc., have established histories in English as a language, and they do not muddle understanding, yet armchair prescriptivists cling to these notions like they are holy scripture.

The problem with descriptivists is that, although language is in flux, there is a great deal of value in learning the rules that most people, especially upper-class people, agree on. If I write a cover letter, I'm not going to write it however I like. The genre of a cover letter dictates that I follow certain rules so I don't sound like an idiot. Furthermore, if I spoke however I pleased, I might not be understood by most people, so it might be expedient to follow the rules.

I lie somewhere in-between. I dislike the dogmatic approach many (including Hatandcoat) have towards language, grammar, and definitions. I love that words can change meaning, via ignorance or otherwise. It means that our language is alive. And many so-called grammar rules are unnecessary and misleading.

But on the other hand, I recognize the need for some rules (especially in certain language genres), and I like the original meanings of words as well as I like the new ones. For me, it's a question of "How many rules are enough," not "Which is right, rules or no rules".

Hatandcoat, care to defend your prescriptivist ways?

*If they did that, they would be acting prescriptivist about their own misinterpretation! It's prescriptivist vs. prescriptivist!

What Unites Districted and Hatandcoat? In a Word: Manblogitude.

One of my favorite word blogs is called "Wordlustitude." Unlike many word blogs (including my own), it's short, funny, and unpretentious. The author finds real instances of made-up neologisms, defines them, gives a real citation, and then makes up a citation.

Here's today's word:

manblogitude

noun. What you'll find, if you dare to look, deep inside the pants of all testosterone-marinated blogs such as this.

Real citation: "I’m not sure I can take a calendar full of steaming hot manblogitude…"
(Dec. 3, 2008, The Comics Curmudgeon, http://joshreads.com/?p=1809)

Made-up citation: "Women love me for my manblogitude. Men hate me for it. Man-blogs admire me. Woman-blogs are curious. Woodland critters are just afraid."

I read that and thought of my little project here with my coblogger.

Please remember, whenever you add "man-" to a word, it makes it not gay and more stereo-hetero. See mancrushish, man-flab, man-fume , man-slutitude , man-strumpet, and mantourage. But I guess that's not a hard and fast rule: see happy man-loaf, man-chete, etc.