The traditional designation of an autobiographical account as a literary genre has always gone by the name memoirs, in the plural, not the singular. Recently, however, writers and readers have begun referring to it exclusively in the singular, viz. memoir. This change can in part be accounted for by the fact that of all contemporary literary genres memoirs was the only one whose designation occurred in the plural only, the singular being reserved for other kinds of written account such as a memorandum, notice, special study, monograph, or history. The change, therefore, can be seen as a lexical normalization.

A possibly covert other reason for the change is the simple fact that speakers and writers––particularly of American English––are ignorant of the original meaning of the word, namely ‘remembrances’ or ‘memories’. The (French) form that took root in English to mean the genre obscures its origin and its attendant meaning, hence facilitating the new recurrence to the singular and the oblivion of the traditional plural.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

In those languages of the world that are inflected, the plurals of nouns are routinely formed by adding a desinence (= inflectional suffix) to the stem of the singular. English is no exception. There is thus an iconic relation between the forms of the two grammatical numbers, viz. the plural is longer than the singular.

However, English also has a set of plurals which are shorter than their singular counterparts, namely the learnèd words of Latin and Greek origin such as medium, phenomenon, criterion, etc., whose plurals (media, phenomena, criteria, etc.) are formed by replacing the desinence of the singular with –a. This is admittedly a small lexical class, but its frequency has also conditioned a change in the history of English whereby the plural forms commonly supplant the singular for both numbers. Thus media is now generally construed as a collective singular––interestingly, with no plural (singulare tantum). There are even contemporary examples of scholarly writing where this change can be observed. Cf. the stylistic barbarism in the following sentence: ”Almost from the very beginning Sologub seemed to be a curious phenomena in Russian Symbolism, for reasons other than his background, profession or appearance.” (S. D. Cioran, “Introduction,” Fyodor Sologub: The Petty Demon [Woodstock: Ardis, 2006], p. 16. This may or may not be a genuinely native solecism, given the Romanian surname of the writer, but it was evidently not caught in proof and thus counts as such all the same).

The change at issue is unidirectional: the plural form always replaces the singular for both numbers. The fact that the normal English plural desinence –s fails to be attached in such words as media can be ascribed to the residual strength of the original meaning of the plural as the marked number. Be that as it may, ultimately the change can be construed as a consequence of the principle of iconism, here dictating that the shorter of the two variants be used as the form of the singular.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

Do is undoubtedly the most protean verb in the English language. All one has to do to be convinced of this fact is to look under the entry in the Oxford English Dictionary.

A man and a woman, both of a certain age, come into a Vermontian tavern and sit down at the bar. They each order a glass of wine. When the bartender pours the drinks, there is some confusion as to which patron wishes the white, which the red, so the female customer says: “He does the white, and I do the red” [emphasis added––MS]. A strange utterance under the circumstances, no?

Whatever could she have meant? That her male companion habitually drinks white wine, and she red, implying that this distribution is at odds with the norm for the two sexes? It’s impossible to interpret the woman’s utterance with certainty.

One is reminded of the fact that just as characters in novels don’t always know their own motives, so with people in real life.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

[Addendum on a personal note: I was sitting in a restaurant cogitating over what this post would contain when a well-known poem by that splendid Russian nineteenth-century lyric poet, A. A. Fet, hove into mental view. For those readers who have Russian, here it is (NB the last line and the preceding enjambment):

* * *

Я пришел к тебе с приветом,
Рассказать, что солнце встало,
Что оно горячим светом
По листам затрепетало;

Рассказать, что лес проснулся,
Весь проснулся, веткой каждой,
Каждой птицей встрепенулся
И весенней полон жаждой;

Рассказать, что с той же страстью,
Как вчера, пришел я снова,
Что душа все так же счастью
И тебе служить готова;

Рассказать, что отовсюду
На меня весельем веет,
Что не знаю сам, что буду
Петь – но только песня зреет.

M.S.]

When a youngish female speaker of American English uses air quotes––i.e., a gesture produced with hands held shoulder-width apart and at the eye level of the speaker, the index and middle fingers on each hand flexing at the beginning and end of the item being quoted–– so frequently as to constitute a verbal TIC, what does that signify?

One could easily interpret this paralinguistic behavior as a species of STAMMERING and thereby subsume it under the general cultural avoidance, especially among the younger generation, of any utterance constituting a straightforward assertion.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

The success of the recent movie “The King’s Speech” has brought public awareness to what the British call stammering and Americans call stuttering. In the movie stuttering is a speech disorder in need of therapy, but stammering is actually part of a whole range of non-pathological phenomena now called disfluencies, including all sorts of interruptions of speech flow. These are typically inserted vocables like “you know,” “I mean,” and various combinations of vowels and consonants (“eh,” ”uh,” “uhm,” etc.), not to mention the currently near-ubiquitous (in North American English, at least) filler “like,” to be heard emanating from the mouths of female speakers below a certain age (45?) in particular.

This last-mentioned word is sometimes dignified by being labeled a “discourse marker” with an approximative or quotative function (among others). A more encompassing characterization would accurately ascribe its pervasive use to a discourse strategy resting on a cultural set toward the message by speakers who use it, viz. that no content is in need of direct ASSERTION: in fact every message, in this strategy, needs to be hedged. The word like is a compact means of implementing such a cultural set because it immediately weakens the assertory value of anything to which it pertains in the utterance.

Nothing could be a surer symptom of a shift in cultural values than the ubiquitous insertion of a word that immediately undercuts the directness of what is being stated. In the last analysis, it is a sign (an index, to be precise) of the speaker’s inability to be responsible for the VALIDITY of ANYTHING that can be asserted.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

What used to be the standard way in American English of complimenting someone on a job well done, viz. “good work!” has largely been replaced by the phrase “good job.” This change in usage is underlain by a shift in the value system, as an analysis of the two variable words reveals.

The difference comes down to the fact that work applies as a noun to the AESTHETIC value of the object resulting from an action. We habitually designate, for instance, art objects as works, not jobs. One can be “good at one’s job” but not “good at one’s work.” One’s work can be one’s job, and in the latter sense job can connote one’s duty, whereas work does not. And so on.

This kind of trip through the connotations of the words at issue will always abut in the conclusion that the accomplished result of what we do when we designate the series of actions as job or work makes the first word concentrate on the acts and not on the product in the traditional usage that rewards the aesthetic value of the product with the designation work.

This value did not accrue in the past to job. Now it does, meaning a hierarchical superordination of the ACTION over the RESULT. In this way, American culture reinforces the axiological dominance of process over result that can be encapsulated in the motto “you are what you do.”

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

There is no doubt that reading pronunciations reign supreme when speakers are ignorant of the traditional pronunciation of a word. This state of affairs is particularly relevant when the word belongs to the class of nomina propria.

The Cambridge Pronouncing Dictionary (17^th ed., 2006) lists only one pronunciation for the name of the country of Bahrain, viz. without the h, and this is the traditional English version regardless of the authentic Arabic original. Yet Peter Kenyon, the NPR correspondent reporting from Dubai this morning (“Morning Edition”), repeatedly pronounced the word with an h, joining the majority of media representatives in their studied ignorance of the established phonetic form.

Ultimately, this kind of mistake is to be adjudged as yet another instance of the drive toward faux authenticity that besets American speakers of English in particular, abetted by an attitude that flouts linguistic precedent.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

Every language has what are called morpheme structure rules. These are generalizations about what combinations of sounds are permitted in certain positions––initial, medial, and final. Some clusters of sounds that are permitted across morpheme and word boundaries are not permitted in word-initial or word-final position. Exceptions may be restricted to foreign borrowings. In English, accordingly, the combination ts- only occurs word-initially in borrowings such as tsetse fly. But because this cluster does not conform to native morpheme structure in word-initial position, it tends to get simplified in the speech of persons who cannot or choose not to make the phonetic effort to pronounce an unusual cluster, and the first consonant is elided in a process that is called by the technical term APHAERESIS. Thus ts > s.

A contemporary illustration of aphaeresis in English is provided by the word tsunami ‘tidal wave’, which has been borrowed from Japanese. While the initial cluster ts- is completely regular in the donor language, it contravenes the rules of English, thereby lending itself to simplification as [sunámi], a pronunciation commonly heard  these days––alongside the non-aphaeretic [tsunámi]––with reference to the recent catastrophe in Japan. Why the second member of the cluster and not the first is elided can be accounted for by the general rule pertaining to initial clusters in English whereby it is always the first and not the second member in this position, as in the pronunciation of words like knight, gnat, psychology, phthisis, etc., whose Old English pronunciation, resp. that in the donor language, involves an initial (unsimplified) cluster.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

The body language accompanying speech is the object of study of paralinguistics. This includes gestures, facial expressions, hand movements, even laughter. Apropos of the latter, Americans––like all nationalities––have a culture-specific range of laughter types, with high-pitched, aesthetically unpleasing laughter being especially common among American females (but not only). This acoustic peculiarity is currently coming into alignment with the infantilized intonation and vocal timbre remarked here before. The ensemble of these paralinguistic traits is distinctively and unflatteringly American.

Another distinctively American species of paralinguistic behavior is the habit of not looking at one’s interlocutor when handing the latter an object. This act violates a fundamental (European and Asian) staple of paralinguistic norms, resulting in behavior that risks being interpreted by a non-American (or culturally multidimensional American) conversation partner as decidedly rude.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

Unlike English, which is a stress language, Japanese is a pitch language, which means that it has low or high pitch on the morae of vowels, not stress. An English speaker typically mistakes Japanese high pitch for stress. In some cases, this results in the relatively undamaged representation of a Japanese word in English, e.g., the toponym Kyushu has high pitch on the first mora of the long vowel ō of the first syllable, and when this word is pronounced with initial stress in English, it sounds more or less authentic. But this doesn’t hold in cases like Tokyo, where both vowels are long and, moreover, high pitch falls on the first mora of the following word, hence, for instance, Tokyo desu ‘it’s Tokyo’ has high pitch on the first syllable of desu ‘is’.

What English speakers tend to do (besides mishearing high pitches as stresses) is to place a stress where it doesn’t correspond to a Japanese high pitch, as in Hiróshima/Hiroshíma. This toponym (like Tokyo) has a high pitch that falls on the first mora of the following word, all three preceding short vowels having low pitch, but the English rules of stress placement in quadrisyllabic words do not allow for ultimate stress in what looks like an English compound.

Occasionally, as in the case currently made notorious because of its damaged nuclear reactor, viz. Fukushima, English speakers happen to place a stress on the vowel corresponding to a vowel with high pitch in the Japanese original, which makes it (fortuitously) sound authentic to the ear of a Japanese speaker. Note even here, however, the alternate placement of stress on the element meaning ‘island’ (shima) following English prosody, which renders the original incorrectly.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO