Language Lore

As the author in the last century of a term paper for Roman Jaokobson on “Paronomasia in the Igor’ Tale, I was happy to see your most recent blogpost. Moreover one of my physical therapist’s favorite expressions is “Let’s get movin’ and groovin’. This coincidence led me to refer to the source of all wisdom, viz. Wikipedia, where I learned thatDuane Eddy’s first single (Moovin’ ‘N’ Groovin’) was a tune that he wrote with Lee Hazlewood, an Arizona disc jockey whom the guitarist had met while hanging out at a radio station as a teenager. Eddy and Hazlewood would go on to collaborate on a string of hit instrumental hits, including “Peter Gunn Theme,” “Boss Guitar” and “Rebel Rouser.”
Some music scholars cite this as the first true example of Surf music, partly because The Beach Boys borrowed the opening riff for their tune “Surfin’ Safari.” “Yeah, they used it,” Eddy told Spinner with shrugs and a chuckle, “and I never cared. That’s just music, sharing little bits of melody and all, no big deal. You know, Bobby Darin asked me about using the title, Moovin’ ‘N’ Groovin’, in his song ‘Splish Splash.’ No problem, I told him.”

Expatiating on a topic that has been broached here before, this morning Y-H-B was waiting to have his car serviced when the advisor came up to me and said: “Your repair is movin’ and groovin’.” It is clear that by using a phrase from common parlance influenced by the whole rap and hip-hop culture we are all assaulted by daily, the advisor wanted to emphasize to me that my car would soon be finished.

All paronomasia is a form of repetition––in this case that of sound. The most prominent species of paronomasia is, of course, rhyme, which is utilized not only in poetry but in ordinary discourse and in advertising. The effect of repetition, whether it occurs in speech, in fashion, or in other forms of behavior, always adds emphasis to what is being expressed. That is also repetition’s functional core.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

On speaking to a lady serving Y-H-B in a local grocery store this morning, I was struck by the beauty of her voice, which was deep without being mannish and well modulated. This contrasted with her appearance, which was not particularly pleasing aesthetically (without being ugly by any means). This reminded me that speaking involves––whatever  else it may be––the voice of the speaker, with varying features normally depending on sex, age, and physical size, including that of the larynx.

Speech is necessarily delivered in a normal speaking voice, which has characteristics of tone, quality, and loudness. The impression a speaker makes on a hearer is thus dependent to a certain degree on these characteristics. Not all speakers are equally aware of the impression their speaking voices make on interlocutors. In most situations this does not have a direct bearing on the content of what is being spoken, but there is no doubt that one’s overall evaluation by others of one’s character is qualitatively dependent in part on one’s speaking voice.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

Because Ukraine is back in the news yet again, one keeps hearing the dialectal pronunciation of the word, with stress on the initial vowel, rather than the standard pronunciation on the final. For instance, the current Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, who has degrees from Harvard and Columbia, consistently mispronounces this word. In view of the word’s current prominence in the media, here is a slightly edited repetition of the post on September 29, 2019:

The word “Ukraine” has been uttered ad nauseam in all the media reports on the Russian invasion of that country. More often than not, the various reporters and hosts cannot seem to decide which vowel gets the stress in this word, to the point where both initial and final stress can occur in the same sentence. Little do the utterers of the word realize that the variant with initial stress is non-standard, even dialectal. It follows the pattern established by such items as guitar and insurance in Southern American English.

In this era of universal media saturation, one cannot but be gobsmacked by the fact that speakers of Standard American English falter when it comes to uttering Ukraine. What homunculus possesses them to mispronounce it thus [NOT “thusly”!]?

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

Readers of this blog can now examine the newest article by Y-H-B, ““Language as Semiosis: A Neo-Structuralist Perspective in the Light of Pragmaticism,” Chinese Semiotic Studies, 18 (2022), 131-146. It can be accessed by clicking on the link “PDFs of Papers by Michael Shapiro” under the title “Semiosis.” Cf. also the comment  (in a recent email to the author) by Vincent Colapietro, one of the world’s leading Peirce scholars (and a friend of long-standing), to wit: This is a very important essay, a distillation of years of intensely focused thought, but more than this a deepening of some of your most important insights into the nature of language and, more generally, of symbols. In sum, bravo!”

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

As has been characterized several times on this blog, Yiddish words and phrases as used in (American) English have a distinct role to play in uttertances with an emotive tinge. This aspect of lexicology and phraseology was brought to the fore of Y-H-B’s consciousness recently when he remembered that as an octogenarian he was approaching the status of an “alter kaker,” alias an “old geezer.” The difference between these two phrases is purely emotive to those speakers of American English who know both, and the nub of the difference is in the word kaker, which literally means ‘shit(-ter)’. The presence of the Yiddish profane verb root gives the phrase a pointedness that the translation lacks. Sic transit gloria mundi!

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

ADDENDUM: A better English equivalent for the Yiddish would be “old fart.”

Even though the word ‘covid’ is a dephrasal abbreviation (< ‘coronovirus disease’), an appropriate derived adjective can and should be proposed, viz. ‘covidaceous’, on the model of arenaceous ‘resembling, made of, or containing sand or sandy particles’.
I hereby launch covidaceous for general use.
MICHAEL SHAPIRO

My  new book, The Logic of Language: A Semiotic Study of Speech, will be published by Springer Nature (New York and Berlin) in 2022. This work is an updated and amalgamated version of my two earlier books in the field (published by Indiana University Press in 1983 and 1991, resp.), The Sense of Grammar: Language as Semeiotic and The Sense of Change: Language as History, and will provide a companion volume to my earlier Springer opus, The Speaking Self: Language Lore and English Usage (2017).
MICHAEL SHAPIRO

When making secondary references to items with a complex sentence, American English (but not only; cf. BBC World Service reporters’ speech) now regularly uses the preposition around  and the prepositional phrase in terms of instead of resorting to locutions like “with regard to” in referencing material that is subordinate to the main content. This regularly results in sentences like “The prospect of development around/in terms of  the unification of the parties.” This syntactic development in the history of the English language is a good example of how linguistic means are always subject to refashioning historically, esp. when it comes to media language.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

In the American media––particularly the audio and video––there has been a marked overuse of certain words, namely the adjectives denoting something emotionally negative such as dire, heart-breaking, devastating, etc. This is amply illustrated by the reporting in the last few days on the torndaos in the south that have wreaked such horrendous damage.

What the media correspondents fail to realize is that by ceaselessly resorting to the same adjectives they are significantly weakening the emotional power of these words. These news sources would be better served if their producers would take the time and the effort to search for alternative lexical means in describing the effects that the terrible disasters have on the victims and on the public at large.

MICHAEL  SHAPIRO