The endocrinologist wore a white coat to match the thatch of white hair surmounting his pate and wrote my anamnesis down hurriedly without looking up, occasionally repeating his questions because he hadn’t heard my answers. (The doctor was hard of hearing but, typical of his profession, obviously hadn’t bothered to remedy the condition.) When my narrative came to benign prostatic hyperplasia, I interrupted to ask about the difference between ‘hyperplasia’ and ‘hypertrophy’, since the condition is vernacularly known as ‘enlargement’. His answer, pronounced with what passed for a smile, was: “That’s just semantics.” Then, evidently embarrassed, he backed up and gave a short definition of each of the terms.

This common denigration of the science of meaning is particularly unfortunate coming from a physician, who of all professionals should be sensitive to the profound bond between words and feelings, hence to the prominent role language and its precise use play in the healing arts.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

Plato says that “thought and speech are the same; only the former, which is a silent inner conversation of the soul with itself, has been given the special name of thought” (Sophist 263E). (My hero, C. S. Peirce, agrees.) What flows from this is that there is no thought worth the name apart from language.

However, the form that inner speech takes may vary almost without limit. In those for whom poetry is second nature, verse often serves as a mnemonic. Thus the poems of my father, Constantine Shapiro (1896-1992), are firmly embedded in my memory and can be disinterred therefrom by random occurrences, as was the case with the following lyric this morning:

Она, как ветерок, легка,
И голос нежный,
И черный локон с милого чела
На лик спадает белоснежный.

Откуда прилетела
Ты, дуновение полей?
Мне милы рощи потемнелы
И соловей.

Я им в младенчестве внимал,
То так далёко!
Но этот голос вновь все рассказал
В мгновенье ока.
1937

Here is a rough prose translation of the Russian original:

She is as light as a breath of wind,
And her voice is gentle,
And a black lock of hair from her lovely forehead
Falls onto her snow-white face.

Whence did you fly in,
You, whiff of fields?
I love the darkened groves
And the nightingale.

I beheld them in my youth,
‘Twas so long ago!
But this voice told me all anew
In the twinkling of an eye.

Readers sensitive to the notion of idées fixes will have no difficulty divining the object in my mind associated with this poem.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

[Analytical addendum (“lost in translation”): The poem in the above post is lexically nuanced in a way that enhances its stylistic subtlety but that cannot be rendered into English. The vocabulary of classical Russian poetry includes items that are traditional high-style equivalents, drawn from the language’s Church Slavonic stratum, of ordinary (demotic) words. Here, in the last two lines of the first stanza (И черный локон с милого чела/На лик спадает белоснежный ‘And a black lock of hair from her lovely forehead/Falls onto her snow-white face’) this pertains to chelo ‘forehead’ for lob (also ‘forehead’) and lik ‘visage’ for litso ‘face’. These grandiloquent words serve to elevate the person described. MS]

Further to the concluding thoughts expressed in the authorial note appended to the preceding post, the second entry under the word virtuous in The American Heritage Dictionary (4th ed., 2006) defines it as ‘possessing or characterized by chastity; pure: a virtuous woman‘. The example cited is straight out of the King James version of the Old Testament (Proverbs 31: 10). This version is closer to the Hebrew tradition than any previous English translation when it comes to the non-Christological portions of the Old Testament; cf. the following translations of the word in question in its fuller Proverbial context:

10 Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies.
11 The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he shall have no need of spoil.
12 She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life. (King James Version)

10 A wife of noble character who can find? She is worth far more than rubies.
11 Her husband has full confidence in her and lacks nothing of value.
12 She brings him good, not harm, all the days of her life. (New International Version)

10 aleph mulierem fortem quis inveniet procul et de ultimis finibus pretium eius
11 beth confidit in ea cor viri sui et spoliis non indigebit
12 gimel reddet ei bonum et non malum omnibus diebus vitae suae (Vulgate)

י אֵשֶׁת-חַיִל, מִי יִמְצָא;    וְרָחֹק מִפְּנִינִים מִכְרָהּ. 10 A woman of valor who can find? for her price is far above rubies.
יא בָּטַח בָּהּ, לֵב בַּעְלָהּ;    וְשָׁלָל, לֹא יֶחְסָר. 11 The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, and he hath no lack of gain.
יב גְּמָלַתְהוּ טוֹב וְלֹא-רָע–    כֹּל, יְמֵי חַיֶּיהָ. 12 She doeth him good and not evil all the days of her life. (The Masoretic Text, i. e., the authoritative Hebrew text of the Jewish Bible)

The latter text is traditionally glossed as follows:

1. She is a virtuous woman––a woman of power and strength. אשת חיל esheth chayil, a strong or virtuous wife, full of mental energy.
2. She is invaluable; her price is far above rubies––no quantity of precious stones can be equal to her worth.

The deriving base of the adjective in question is Latin virtus; cf. Greek ἀρετή, both of which mean something like ‘moral excellence’. In turn, Latin virtus is derived from vir ‘man, hero’. This last meaning was doubtless what the translators who rendered the King James version must have had in mind, since they followed the Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Bible. Hence the meaning ‘a woman of valor’, which is precisely the definition answering to the purport of the relevant portion of my authorial note.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

Poems written many years or centuries ago routinely reflect the diction and the rhetorical values of their own time, no matter how up-to-date the language may sound. (Russian is much more conservative in this respect than is English.) Occasionally, what was a poetic cliché at the time of writing can be refurbished in a contemporary reading simply because its banality has faded in the interim. This is the case with one word in particular––viz. the second word, гений ‘genius’, in the last line of the opening stanza––in what is undoubtedly Pushkin’s most famous lyric poem (the full phrase is гений чистой красоты ‘genius of pure beauty’):

К ***
Я помню чудное мгновенье:
Передо мной явилась ты,
Как мимолетное виденье,
Как гений чистой красоты.

В томленьях грусти безнадежной
В тревогах шумной суеты,
Звучал мне долго голос нежный
И снились милые черты.

Шли годы. Бурь порыв мятежный
Рассеял прежние мечты,
И я забыл твой голос нежный,
Твои небесные черты.

В глуши, во мраке заточенья
Тянулись тихо дни мои
Без божества, без вдохновенья,
Без слез, без жизни, без любви.

Душе настало пробужденье:
И вот опять явилась ты,
Как мимолетное виденье,
Как гений чистой красоты.

И сердце бьется в упоенье,
И для него воскресли вновь
И божество, и вдохновенье,
И жизнь, и слезы, и любовь.
1825

(NB: all English translations typically change or omit ‘genius’, by which they unwittingly destroy the meaning not only of the line but of the whole poem.)

The use of the word genius by Pushkin in the meaning (as given in the Oxford English Dictionary Online) of “the quasi-mythologic personification of something immaterial (e.g. of a virtue, a custom, an institution), esp. as portrayed in painting or sculpture. Hence transf. a person or thing fit to be taken as an embodied type of (some abstract idea)” was taken over from French génie into the quotidian poetic vocabulary of Russian in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. In the nomenclature of Russian Romanticism, this word lost its freshness through repeated use but is here rescued from banality, recovering a semantic miraculousness via its very obsolescence.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

[Author’s note: After writing this post I discovered that I had duplicated an earlier one, but so what? Pushkin’s verse is never far from my consciousness. Some readers of this blog have occasionally asked me how I get my ideas for posts, and in this case I am especially happy to oblige. As I was walking up Broadway on Manhattan’s Upper West Side after exiting a restaurant where I normally have pancakes early Sunday morning, for some reason I started declaiming this poem out loud, there being no one else in my vicinity. As I reached the word and the phrase in question, I once again realized their special poetic value and thought immediately of my late wife, Marianne, whom they invariably resurrect, and of whom I think every day of my life. MS]

Nasalization is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, allowing the breath stream to pass through the nose instead of the mouth during the sound’s production. There are nasal consonants and nasal vowels, but beyond this characterization one notes that some speakers have a strong nasalization of their entire utterances, whether they contain nasal sounds or not (= “talking through one’s nose”). This observation pertains especially to the speech of contemporary American females of the younger generation (adolescents, college students, and beyond).

Anything, including phonetic features, which serves to mitigate or attenuate the directness of an utterance, can be interpreted as a means of forestalling disagreement or deflecting potential risk. Could this phenomenon, therefore, qualify as an apotropaism? Given the several other ways that the latter has been chronicled in earlier posts, it is at least an educated guess, hence a valid abductive inference and amenable to testing.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

Word histories are often characterized by twists and turns. A good example is router, which is derived from the word route (of Anglo-Norman provenience, i.e., Middle English < Old French < Latin). In contemporary American English the alternate form of the deriving base [raʊd], rhyming with rout instead of root, clearly stems from a reading (= spelling) pronunciation and is still typically listed second in the dictionaries.

Of course, anyone who knows the song “Route 66” (lyrics by Bobby Troup) will not fail to give the word route in the refrain its proper “British” pronunciation, as in:

If you ever plan to motor west,
Travel my way, take the highway that is best.
Get your kicks on route sixty-six.

The persistence of [ruːt] (and the total inappropriateness of [raʊd]) here is to be explained by the poetic design in its phonic aspect: the internal rhyme kicks/sixty-six utilizes the high unrounded vowel /i/, which dictates the presence of the corresponding high rounded vowel /u/ in route.

By contrast, the new meaning of router (it has several older ones) connected with internet technology is unexceptionally pronounced [ˈraʊdər] on this side of the Atlantic. Here is its complete entry from the Oxford English Dictionary Online:

router, n.
Pronunciation: Brit. /ˈruːtə/ , U.S. /ˈraʊdər/
Etymology: < route v. + -er suffix¹.
Electronics and Computing.

A device, circuit, algorithm, etc., which serves to determine the destinations of individual incoming signals; esp. a device which receives data packets and forwards them to the appropriate computer network or part of a network.

1968    Nucl. Physics A. 116 549   A router circuit sent the coincidences from the first unit to be stored in the first 200 channels of the pulse-height analyser and those from the second to the last 200 channels.
1970    Nucl. Instruments & Methods 85 64/2   A ‘router’ switched the output of the detector to each of the subgroup in succession.
1986    Science 28 Feb. 976/2   The router can pick a component of the node address that is not zero and send the message in a direction in which that component of the node address is one.
1990    Pract. Computing Sept. 85/3   This enables printers with Apple’s built-in network, Localtalk, to be connected to Ethernet‥without the need for an expensive gateway or router.
2006    Hi Life No. 5. 34/1   If you add a Wi-Fi router to your broadband link you’ll be able to access the internet via Wi-Fi-equipped laptop from any room in your home.

The explanation in the case of the derived word is its MARKED STATUS, i. e., an agentive in –er that is an object, not a person, hence conducing to the iconic pronunciation (= word and meaning forming a diagram in the semiotic sense) with the marked vowel /aw/. This is a good illustration of markedness agreement (between sound and sense) being a definitive––if only potential–– telos of language change, not a necessary one. British English, by contrast with American, has not yet exploited the semiotic potential inherent in this particular case of lexical development.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

There is always a kind of figure-ground relation between linguistic errors and the grammatically correct context in which they are embedded. Consequently, when a native speaker who is otherwise articulate and speaks the standard language makes an error, it tends to create an outsized effect.

This phenomenon was recently demonstrated in an NPR report broadcast by the Middle East and Africa correspondent, Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, a speaker of standard American English (despite the Hispanic name) educated in the U. K. and the U. S. A. Her speech generally makes the impression of a carefully cultivated preciosity bordering on prissiness, so that when she mispronounced the word cache to rhyme with cachet, it had a jarringly percussive effect on this listener. Quod erat demonstrandum.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

The  emergence of discourse-introductory so in the speech of computer geeks was noted in an earlier post, but closer attention to the language of adolescents and college students has prompted a further exploration of the topic in a wider context.

The emotive connotation of an utterance can be signaled by a number of means, most prominent among which are intonation and affective (particularly, hypocoristic) vocabulary. Discourse strategies can also subserve what is at bottom an emotive aim, viz. predisposing one’s interlocutor to regard favorably––or, at least, to postpone judgment on––whatever is being asserted. In this respect the opening gambit can set the tone, including establishing a channel of communication (i. e., the so-called PHATIC function of speech). This is where discourse-introductory so comes in.

The widespread, practically obligatory use of the word so to open a discourse or join one in the language of the younger generation of present-day American English speakers goes beyond the phatic function, however. In a culture which prizes the establishment and maintenance of anodyne relations in order to promote stylistic solidarity between its members at all costs, an annex has been built in to adjoin the phatic, which can only be regarded as APOTROPAIC.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

The range of stylistic inappropriateness in language use is immeasurably wide, but one subspecies is deserving of note in the current climate of the spread of English as the world’s lingua franca, namely the insertion of a colloquialism by non-native speakers in an otherwise formal context. This act invariably makes for an estrangement from the speaker by listeners when the former has a marked foreign accent, no matter how grammatically fluent the person’s command of the language.

This stylistically jarring phenomenon was exemplified by the radio clip (on NPR) of a recorded pronouncement by the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, Olivier Blanchard, a Frenchman with a marked accent who has apparently spent his professional life in the USA. Mr. Blanchard, who was heard today using the colloquialism “getting their act together” in referring to the European nations’ sovereign debt crisis, exemplified the alienating effect of such an irruption, which moreover has the conceivable subsidiary (and clearly unintended) consequence of diminishing the listener’s credence in the utterance’s validity.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

That young people in America in the early twenty-first century are tending toward an androgynous self-fashioning is beyond doubt, but a sub-category of this trend should also be noted as it pertains to speech patterns. Young males (adolescents and those in their twenties, in particular) are steadily adopting the language of the female members of their cohort, in two salient and conjugate respects: (1) interrogative intonation on subordinate clauses in declarative sentences; and (2) the (non-quotative) use of the word like to the point of verbal tichood as a way of defanging every assertory element in the sentence, from single words to whole phrases. Both of these discourse strategies originate in strictly female speech and have now invaded that of young males. As remarked upon in earlier posts, this detail of language use in contemporary American English is further evidence of the fact that a person’s sex is less and less determinative of their role and their behavior in the culture than is class.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO