Language Lore

Every language has proverbs. English, Russian, and Japanese have not only the largest lexica but also the greatest number of proverbs, with the most comprehensive Japanese proverb dictionaries approaching a six-figure total. English in all its varieties differs from Russian and Japanese in the ecological prominence of proverbs in actual use, which is to say that speakers and writers of English no longer habitually recur to proverbs. When was the last time you uttered the words––or heard anyone else say–– A stitch in time saves nine?

By contrast, Russians and Japanese sprinkle their speech with proverbs at every turn. This paroemic predilection has nothing to do with the speaker’s class or education, nor with urban vs. agrarian social context. When a Russian resorts to the proverb na net i suda net––literally, ‘to a NO there’s no justice/court’––to express resignation before an insuperable impasse, they are employing a piece of paronomasia that conveys its meaning with a poetic punch not available to a purely discursive statement.

Beyond paronomasia, there is also the frequent special force of figuration conjured up in proverbs that is colligated  with their analogical imagery. When a Japanese says setchin-mushi mo tokorobiiki (雪隠虫も所贔屓) ‘even the dung beetle loves its own bailiwick’, a whole world far removed from contemporary mores comes to life that endows the utterance’s context with a particular purport. The linguistic ecology of modern-day English is all the poorer for having foregone the paroemic riches at its disposal.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

Variety may be the spice of life, but repetition is its foundation. Bilateral symmetry, biorhythms, cyclical bodily functions, night and day––everything involves repetition. When it comes to language, repetition may be stylistically benign or malign, with instances of the former lending themselves to rhetorical utility. Thus Hamlet’s “Words, words, words.” (Hamlet: Act 2, Scene 2, line 192) is a device that classical rhetoric classifies as epizeuxis or palilogia, defined as the repetition of a single word, with no other words in between, for emphasis or to convey vehemence.

There is also the kind of repetition in speech, such as stammering or the insertion of “you know” or “like” at every turn, that belongs to a generally harmless class of disfluencies, i. e., those that are, or border on, VERBAL TICS. When a person habitually and profusely interlards his utterances with phrases like “in other words,” “incidentally,” or “by the way,” a benign interpretation would grant speakers prone to them the use of these aimless interruptions of the speech flow as slot fillers or place markers they evidently need to fill out the diapason of discourse time while sorting out in their mind exactly what to say and in what order.

But the question nevertheless hangs in the air as to why such fillers are needed at all; why, indeed, a simple pause wouldn’t do. The easy answer is that many speakers value the phatic function over the referential: they wish, in other words, to keep their listeners/interlocutors rhetorically at bay, so to speak, by elongating their utterances and thereby gaining discourse time at the expense of their partners’. (In the last sentence I have used fillers of the sort being discussed advisedly.) In the final analysis, even this speech strategy can be seen as nothing more than a (puerile?) aggrandizement––possibly an unconscious one––of the utterer’s ego.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

Language is like a sparkle machine, producing epiphenomena in use that are unattested in dictionaries or otherwise ungrounded in the norms of speech. One such case is the nonce locution in front of used instead of “before” or “to” in designating the number of minutes preceding the hour, which can be heard emanating from the mouth of the local host of the NPR program “Morning Edition” on WAMC-FM (Northeast Public Radio). There is, of course, no need for such an innovation, whatever its origin, and it can only arouse the ire and annoyance of a language purist, but it nevertheless indirectly reminds one of the issue of innovations in language change.

Language is full of examples of items that are unsanctioned by the speech community. Some of these are purely personal linguistic idiosyncrasies, including unusual pronunciations, morphological deviations, and syntactically ill-formed constructions. But some can also be innovations that have the capacity to be copied and to spread throughout the speech community. One of the tasks of historical linguists interested in the theory of change is explaining just this capacity.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

With the onslaught of mass media and the entrenchment of standard languages, regional accents are becoming an endangered species throughout the industrialized world. To be sure, these varieties continue to play a role in cementing solidarity among members of a (relatively) homogeneous speech community without necessarily excluding newcomers whose speech adheres without exception to the standard. From the perspective of an outsider looking in, moreover, regional accents can be seen to have a certain connotative content, one that arouses a kind of exogenous aesthetic admiration for the colorful, unadulterated, and authentic features of language in use. What is routinely taken unreflexively by the speaker of a regional dialect as nothing more than linguistic habit, in the service of purely utilitarian communicative goals, can alternately be perceived by the speaker of the standard as an aesthetic object.

Thus, episodic exposure to an authentic native pronunciation in a region (like rural Vermont) where the colorless standard otherwise reigns supreme can have the effect of causing a positive reevaluation of dialects for their (unintended) symbolic byproduct, viz. a heightened awareness of the historical persistence of linguistic mores that connote a subtle form of human solidarity.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet.” (Romeo and Juliet [II, ii, 1-2]). When Juliet utters these words, little does she know how wrong she is, both in the play and generally. Every name has a particular semantic load, and its meaningfulness can be enhanced by its relative transparency, both as to constituent structure (if any) and its iconic potential. In the event, the beauty––here, the goodness of fit––is definitely in the ear of the beholder.

Languages and cultures differ quite widely in the latitude they countenance as to onomastic structure and use. With reference to fore- and surnames, there are cultures (like Indonesian) in which persons typically go by only one name (cf. some performers in Western cultures). If they regularly allot more than one name to their members, there may be a range of variability, such as middle names beside first and last names in Anglo-Saxon and Romance countries. Russian occupies a unique place with its de rigueur triplet of forename, patronymic (father’s name modified by a suffix), and surname, the latter two differing––within morphological limitations–– according to the sex of the bearer (e. g., the daughter of Mikhail Konstantinovich [Michael, son of Constantine] is always known as Avigeia Mikhajlovna [Abigail, daughter of Michael], regardless of a change in surname through marriage, etc.). Some cultures (like Hungarian and Japanese) impose a reverse order of given and family names compared to that of Western European ones, viz. last name preceding first name.

What is interesting in the American context is the huge variety of naming practices, owing to the fact of the multicultural population and the historical persistence of certain patterns inherited from bygone eras, such as giving the offspring the mother’s maiden name as a forename. The upshot is an impression that any combination is possible, but this is not strictly so. Jews, for instance, adhere traditionally to Biblical forenames preceding obviously Jewish surnames, although this custom is undergoing fragmentation so that one now encounters formerly unthinkable combinations like “Kevin Shapiro” or “Scott Goldberg.” And the Anglophone Chinese, particularly in Hong Kong, have, of course, long masked their proper given names with Christian ones.

Depending on knowledge and sensitivity to language, each speaker of American English will have a reaction to or evaluation of the particular combination of names borne by someone else in the culture, ranging from neutral to marked. The unusualness or rarity of a surname, for instance, may elicit questions as to its provenience.

Returning to the Shakespeare lines with which this post began, one should note that “Rose” is nowhere to be found among the hundred currently most popular girls’ given names, having been elbowed out by argosies of Tiffanys, Courtneys, Kimberlys et al. Tant pis!

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

The voiced consonant one hears in American English (among other varieties of English) between vowels post-tonically (= after the stress) in words like bitter and bidder is called an alveolar flap, a sound articulated with the tip of the tongue placed against the alveolar ridge and the vocal bands vibrating. This allophone (phonetic variant) of the phonemes /t/ and /d/, symbolized [ᴅ], is also heard after the post-vocalic nasal /n/, so that international is typically pronounced [-nᴅ-].

The identical intervocalic pronunciation of orthographic t and d can create an unintended comic effect when the words in question belong to two stylistically quite incompatible sectors of the lexicon. Thus, the recent frequency in the news of the Swiss name Blatter (the surname of the FIFA president, Sepp Blatter), which Americans understandably pronounce with an alveolar flap, makes the man sound like a component of human anatomy.

What has not been remarked elsewhere, however, is the stylistic restriction on such a neutralization of the difference between /t/ and /d/, namely in formal speech. But less-than-careful speakers, even radio announcers, do allow themselves to carry over their informal phonetic habits into formal diction, with noticeable effect. Thus the male radio voice one hears announcing the name of the organization, Public Radio International, after its programs habitually fails to articulate the appropriate formal variant [t]––i.e., the dental stop––in the third word, substituting the alveolar flap instead, which makes him sound less than sober.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

If the face is the window of the soul (cf. L. vultus est index animi), then speech is the window of the mind. Pauses between words are also part of speech, and as such are to be reckoned as indices of mental states.

Pauses may be motivated by a number of performance factors, including indecision and habitual stammering. But nothing except some kind of deficiency explains pausing between “President” and “Komorowski,” as did President Barack Obama in his recorded remarks from Poland, broadcast over the radio today, addressing his Polish counterpart. Not only does this particular pause—i. e. between grammatically closely-bound words––signify a lack of fluency, it also betrays a lack of connection to the addressee and to the context on the utterer’s part.

The language of Mr. Obama’s public speaking, despite all the praise heaped on it by commentators for its putative rhetorical skill, is actually often less than fluent, which is to say that the words do not FLOW (L fluens, fluēnt-, present participle of fluere, ‘to flow’). When these commentators say—as did the one on the BBC World Service, whose words accompanied today’s clip—that Mr. Obama sounds “professorial,” the mind boggles (v. intrans.). Unnatural hesitation, pauses between words, elongated enunciation: are these the phonetic characteristics that make speech “professorial?” If this is an accurate judgment by the public, it can only reflect badly on the professoriate.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

There once lived a woman who hated clichés. This post is intended to explicate her linguistic animus.

Clichés exist in every language. They are typically old, worn-out, fatigued figures of speech which have fossilized through constant use into words and phrases that have a rigid meaning and are repeated ad nauseam because they render complex semantic relations compactly.

Here is a contemporary example, in context, of a tired trope, perfect storm (meaning a confluence of events that drastically aggravates a situation):

“You had this perfect storm [emphasis added] where in his Middle East speech Obama didn’t explain very well what he meant by ‘land swaps,’ Netanyahu was so upset by the mention of 1967 borders that he basically mischaracterized the president’s proposal for four days, and as a result the whole visit became hyperpartisan at a time when Israel was looking for bipartisan support from the United States,” said David Makovsky, director of the Project on the Middle East Peace Process at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. (James Kitfield, “Netanyahu’s ‘Unvarnished Truth’ Tour,” www.theatlantic.com, May 25, 2011)

Instead of saying “a confluence of events” the writer has resorted to this tired cliché. It may be more apt than usual, given the politically fraught context, but it is nonetheless a token of a mental slovenliness that elicits stylistic contempt. Perhaps only a deliberate revivification of the phrase via semantic disinterment (e. g., “the perfect storm didn’t have much wind at its back” ) could ever hope to rescue this freshly-laid corpse––along with all its lifeless congeners––from their tropological resting place. R. i. p. would be a fitter fate.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

Nothing could be more misleading than to taxonomize modern humans by the Latin phrase homo sapiens ‘wise or knowing man’. A more appropriate label would be homo figurans ‘figural or troping man’ because nothing defines the difference between humans and other bipedal primates more essentially than our ability and, more importantly, our propensity to simultaneously say one thing while meaning another. This tropism toward tropes is the differentia specifica of human beings.

If ever one needed further evidence of the quiddity of this existential truth, it was supplied obliquely in an interview heard today on the BBC World Service with a British soldier. Recalling his first meeting with his deceased fiancée, a medical doctor killed in an ambush in Afghanistan, he described her as having “ticked all the boxes” for him. One could, of course, easily fault the soldier for resorting to such an utterly flat and colorless figure of speech to limn what was evidently an emotionally freighted recollection. His mode of expression instantiated nonetheless just that essentially human cognitive capacity which separates us from the other hominidae.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

Occasionally, when penning these posts (note the paronomasia), your humble blogger vacillates in his formulations and struggles to find the mot juste. Apropos, need it be said, for instance, that instead of “fragments” in the title of this post, I first thought of the German word Fragmente, echoing the frequent recurrence by my father (who studied with Husserl in Freiburg) to Diels’s Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker in our conversations about the pre-Socratic philosophers? (I used to tell my own students that the truth could only be spoken in German.)

It might be of more than passing interest that when composing the post preceding this one (“Idiosyncratic Pronunciations: Tone-Deafness?”), I first wrote “slavish” and then changed the adjective to “stubborn” before settling on “contrarian.” The first variant was rejected for obvious––apotropaic––reasons (given the speaker being characterized); the second for reasons of insecurity regarding psychological motivation. Hence emerged “contrarian,” with its appositely neutral descriptive tinge, as the published variant.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO