I Heart Word Nerds, Again

The New York Times had an interesting article on "crash blossoms." Crash blossoms is the coined phrase for headlines that bring on alternate readings. This results from nouns being confused for verbs and vice versa.

English is especially prone to such ambiguities. Since English is weakly inflected (meaning that words are seldom explicitly modified to indicate their grammatical roles), many words can easily function as either noun or verb. And it just so happens that plural nouns and third-person-singular present-tense verbs [that's a lot of hyphens. And a mouthful] are marked with the exact same suffix, "-s." In everyday spoken and written language, we can usually handle this sort of grammatical uncertainty because we have enough additional clues to make the right choices of interpretation. But headlines sweep away those little words -- particularly articles, auxiliary verbs and forms of "to be" -- robbing the reader of crucial context.

These double-take headlines were first referred to as "crash blossoms" last August on an online discussion forum for Testy Copy Editors. Mike O'Connell, an American editor based in Japan, posted the headline "Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms" and joked that he wondered what a "crash blossom" was. (The article was about the successful music career of a woman whose father died in a Japan Airlines crash.) Another participant in the forum, Dan Bloom, suggested they should refer to these types of headlines as "crash blossoms."

An example of a crash blossom is "British Left Waffles on Falklands." In the correct reading, "left" is a noun (referring to liberal politicians) and "waffles" is a verb. But the headline also can conjure up images of Britons leaving breakfast food on the Falkland Islands.

Other examples of crash blossoms from the article:

*"Giant Waves Down Queen Mary's Funnel"

*"McArthur Flies Back to Front"

*"Eighth Army Push Bottles Up Germans"

*"Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim"

*"Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge"

*"McDonald's Fries the Holy Grail for Potato Farmers"

*"Google Fans Phone Expectations by Scheduling Android Event"

*"Gator Attacks Puzzle Experts"

I Know It's Not Very Mature That I Find This Humorous

Canada has a history magazine called "The Beaver". It was first published in 1920 by Hudson's Bay Company, and is currently published by Canada's National History Society. It recently had to undergo a name change to "Canada's History" because of internet filters.

To be more precise, the title was doomed by a vulgar alternative meaning that causes web filters at schools and junk mail filters in e-mail programs to block access to material containing the magazine's name. "It's only been in the last two years or so that it's been a problem," said Deborah Morrison, the president and chief executive of the history society, which is based in Winnipeg, Manitoba. "'Beaver' is one of those key words students are denied access to on the internet."

"Canada's history: Formerly the beaver. Now dick." -- I think that was Canada's centennial slogan...

Thoughts on Maine

I came upon this article about a 240-year-old elm tree in Yarmouth, Maine that was chopped down. The tree, named Herbie, was New England's largest and oldest. The tree succumbed to Dutch elm disease (after surviving 14 previous bouts of the disease. Herbie was a fighter!). Interestingly, the tree's caretaker was a man who is 101 years old. What is in the water in Maine?!

Sing it with me Mick: Goodbye Herbie on Tuesday.

Eagan's mom is from Maine and I said to him, "I wonder if your mom knew Herbie...Everyone knows everything about everyone else in Maine (I'm pretty sure that's the state motto). Even if it is a tree."

Eagan replied, "Probably. That is the most exciting thing to happen in Maine since, well, something else that happened..."

Game Change

Hendrik Hertzberg reviewed the book Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. This book (and it's terrible title. Could it be any wordier?) made headlines recently for revealing the Harry Reid "negro"/"light-skinned" comment. I had heard that the book is more like gossip than investigative journalism, and that there are some ethical concerns behind the book. And, so, upon reading Hertzberg's review, I love how perfectly he described it:

The story of the 2008 presidential campaign is a more than twice-told tale, but this is the first time it has been told in the style of an airport potboiler. The prose races along, lubricated by cliches. Terry McAuliffe, Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, tells the Clintons that Hillary has finished third in the Iowa caucuses: "McAuliffe's words landed like a roundhouse right on the Clintons' collective jaw." Barack Obama hits town as a newly minted United States senator: "He was smarter than the average bear, not to mention the average politician, and he not only knew it but wanted to make sure that everyone else knew it, too." The queen of Hillaryland wins in New Hampshire: "She looked like a quarterback who'd just completed a last-second Hail Mary pass in overtime." (In the Clinton White House, Hillaryland was the East Wing's shorthand for the First Lady's circle. Extrapolating, Heilmann and Halperin give us McCainworld, Kerryville, the Edwardsphere, and O-Town as well, inducing in the reader the bouncy sensation of being in a theme park.)

The cover is just as great as the title. Do you notice how "Game" has the word "Game" written backwards behind it? Same with "Change". Weird. The editor and book designer really dropped the ball on approving this book.

That's not to say I don't enjoy some gossip. The books points out, as the review says, that the candidates have a fondness for the word "fuck".

*John Edwards's reaction to losing in Iowa: "Well, we're fucked."

*Elizabeth Edwards's response to a certain campaign assignment: "Why the fuck do you think I'd want to go sit outside a Wal-Mart and hand out leaflets?"

*Barack Obama, referring to the chaos of "McCainworld": "No fucking discipline."

*Hillary Clinton, after being accused of citing the assassination of Robert Kennedy as a reason for her to stay in the running: "Unfuckingbelievable!"

*John McCain's response to his wife, Cindy, interrupting him: (With both middle fingers raised) "Fuck you! Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck."

I smell Pulitzer.

Wow, That is Scathing...

David Denby, a film critic for The New Yorker magazine, on the following movies:

"Brothers": The script feels mechanical and obvious, and, except for Gyllenhaal, the movie is disastrously miscast. Maguire's Sam is humorless and odd-looking in his high-and-tight military haircut even before he goes away, and Portman, an elfin, improbably pretty thing, is unconvincing as a former cheerleader and young mother of two; they don't set off the dimmest of sparks in each other.

"It's Complicated": Is Nancy Meyers ("Something's Gotta Give") the squarest person ever to make a movie? This new embarrassment helps make the case. Meryl Streep, reduced to giggling, fumbling, gossipy ordinariness for the first time in her career... She has an affair with her husband who left her ten years earlier, played by Alec Baldwin, who comes off as hyperaggressive, dull, wet, and fat. At the same time, Streep flirts with her architect, played all milquetoasty by Steve Martin. The characters are upper-middle-class people who act like TV's lower-middle-class people.

I Heart Word Nerds

The Washington Post had an interesting (and awesomely nerdy) article on linguists and lexicographers choosing a word of the year. Merriam-Webster picked "admonish" (boring). The Oxford English Dictionary picked "unfriend." The Global Language Monitor's media-analysis software made "Twitter" the word of the year and "global warming" the word of the decade. The American Dialect Society chose "tweet" for 2009 and "Google" as the word of the decade.

The article has all kinds of nerdy tidbits and dialogue:

*The American Dialect Society's first ever Word of the Year, in 1990, was "bushlips" (ouch. I bet there's some regret there...).

*In 2000, the American Dialect Society picked "web" to represent the 1990s, "jazz" for the 20th century, and "she" for the millennium.

*Merriam-Webster's online dictionary gets 1.3 billion page views a year. Look-ups for "empathy" shot up during the Sonia Sotomayor hearings; "philanderer" during the Mark Sanford confessions; "emaciated" after the news of Michael Jackson's death; "indigenous" after the premiere of the movie Avatar.

*Merriam-Webster adds 100 words to its database each year.

*Urban Dictionary receives 2,000 reader submissions a day.

*Global Language Monitor calculates that a new English word is born every 98 minutes.

An editor at the American Heritage Dictionary recently got a tattoo of this phonetic vowel chart on his back. That is awesomely nerdy.

*Jack Lynch, author of The Lexicographer's Dilemma says we're living in a time of rapid word creation, with no gatekeeper for slang. He said purists have always complained about the erosion of "proper" language, but he said a lexicographer's job is to describe the flux, not prescribe a paradigm. "Language has been going to hell since forever. Let's not worry about English. It's been doing fine for 1,500 years and it's going to outlive us all. "

In the behavior spectrum of American conferencing, the linguists and lexicographers fall on the social end, confides a waiter at the hotel's "tavern". They gab. "They're not like the scientists, who sit alone and order coffee without looking up," the waiter says. "And they linger."

In meeting rooms at the hotel, they ramble about Vedic Sanskrit and Oregon English and chide one another for talking too fast. The lobby echoes with chatter about clitics and fricatives and vowel fission. Conclusions are reached about Northern Virginia (natives have begun to speak like they're from Ohio rather than the South) and the effect of first names on longevity (people whose names begin with "D" seem to die soon than others). Talks are given on "Learning to Talk Like a Heterosexual" and "The Effect of Dialect Features Under Intoxication" and how "Abbrevs is Totes the Lang of the Fuche."

Thirty students and scholars show up for Thursday's nominating session in a meeting room. They jaw about the possible displacement of "search" by "Google," how the flu-prevention term "Dracula sneeze" translates into American Sign Language. They argue the merits of "Salahi" as a verb and the pronunciation of H1N1 as "heinie."

The man in the bow tie is a 68-year-old dictionary editor from Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and he stops by a table in the hotel tavern Thursday night to greet four fellow wordmen. The average age at the table is about 60, and there's a preponderance of tweed, cufflinks, and monogrammed dress shirts. The 41-year-old Oxford English Dictionary editor literally wrote the book on the F word, and Allan Metcalf, executive director of the American Dialect Society since 1980, literally wrote the book on "OK" (subtitle: "America's Greatest Invention").

There's a posse of rebel linguists who won't let "sea kittens" and "Dracula sneeze" die. A gentleman in a gray suit argues against "H1N1" as word of the year because it would mean succumbing to the pork lobby. There are speeches against "9/11" as word of the decade because it would mean the terrorists win. Every two minutes someone shouts, "Fail!"

*At the American Dialect Society conference, when taking suggestions for word of the decade, a 69 year old man suggested, "Anyone for 'sexting'?" To which someone in the audience replied, "Well if you give me your number!"

*Two linguist students from William & Mary are annoyed that "unfriend" came up as a suggestion for the word of the year. "'Un' is like 'opposite', whereas 'de' connotes 'taking away.'"

*During final arguments, someone from the crowd says, "I'd like to speak against all of these arguments for 'tweet' because they are all over 140 characters long."

In conclusion, I really liked this quote by Richard Bailey, a professor emeritus of English from the University of Michigan: "Language is an index of our social identity."

Style

You know what needs to make a serious comeback (or introduction, if we're being honest)? The peasant braid*. Yulia Tymoshenko, the prime minister of Ukraine, is leading the charge.

And she could look like this every day, but she refuses, because she's THAT dedicated to the cause of peasant braids:

*Or at least that's what I hear it being referred to as. I have no idea if that's its proper name or not