No, Thursday's Out....

I got some fun pushback to "They're All Read Words."  One beleagured parent protested that he had to keep his daughters from using words wrong, or no one would ever understand them. My friend Keith patiently explained to me that "mansplain" is suboptimal,  while "personsplain" is better. (Well played, Keith.) My friend Mark threatened to send a 12,000 word correction.  And Faithful Reader Glaven sent in a response worthy of guest editorial status. So I'm bumping it, and sharing the limelight: Glaven wrote:  The problem with descriptivism, as DFW pointed out in his essay, is: how many times do "the people" have to use a word to mean something other than what the dictionary says it means before you accept it as vaild? Peggy Hill, on "King of the Hill", fancied herself fluent in Spanish, and when someone defied or stood up to her, she would say, in an outraged voice, "Eschuca me?!" Which does NOT mean "Excuse me....

I volunteer on Wednesdays with two little boys who are beginning  readers. Both of them lost their two front teeth this winter, so the cuteness factor is high..  My first stint is with Tex, and my second with Romeo (not their real names, but you would approve of these as pseudonyms if you met them).  Our assignment is just to make reading fun. The first day, I tried some of the getting-to-know-you questions with Tex, but he would have none of it. “What’s your favorite animal?” He made no sound, but silently mouthed, “I don’t know.”   “Okay, well, do you have any pets?”   Silently, “I don’t know.” I said, “Come on, you know whether you have a pet or not!” He sat me out. He’d resist torture, as a POW. I went on to the traditional beginning question: “Do you want me to read to you, or do you want to read to me?” He pointed to me. Second week, same thing. Info on a need-to-know   basis only. But I had brought him a card, in an envelope. He couldn’...

Of all the Linguistic-ish things I’ve done lately, the one I’ve enjoyed the most is listening to a podcast called Lingthusiasm.   My favorite episode is #25, Every Word is a Real Word. The presenters start right off with that assertion, because they are descriptivists, and they don’t want to leave the question hanging, in a faux-both-sides style, only to be resolved in the end. Nope. All words are real words, end of debate. But then they list the subcategories of what they think people mean when they say, “That’s not a real word.” That’s not a word I know. One of the presenters first saw the word “isthmus” when she was 27. I was 67 when I encountered “octothorp.” They sure don’t LOOK real, but we must remember we do not know everything there is to know. That’s annoying jargon; that’s a word of which I disapprove;   that is a word you made up or a brand name you are using when you should be using a generic; that’s a highly informal and colloquial world; that word isn’t ...

Winter term is nearly over, so I’m sharing some more amaze-your-friends factoids, before the well runs dry.  What do you call this symbol? I called it the “pound sign” for a while, and I believe I heard that in in instructions to enter a number and then “press pound.”   Before that, I guess I would have called it the number sign, and I still USE it that way, as in “reason #3 was….” More recently, I’m likely to call it a hashtag, and it also shows up in image searches as the “hash sign.”    But it has another name! It is the “octothorp.” Honest. Here’s the Oxford English Dictionary definition.   Up in the Etymology section, they guess that perhaps the word combines “octo” with the surname “Thorpe.” Down in the 1996 quotation from the New Scientist, it’s suggested that the shape was “playfully construed as eight fields surrounding a village,” since “thorp” was an Old English word for village. It does have eight points.... ------- octothorp, n. For...

We’ve looked at Kazakh, Malagasy, Turkish, Bulgarian, Swahili, Cree, Finnish, and of course English, in my Linguistics class, and last week we spent some time on Klingon.  Here’s the thing I enjoyed the most about Klingon – it has a special morpheme that means “so-called.”  So you can say, for instance, “this chair,” or “this small chair,” or “this so-called chair.” But “so-called” doesn’t go into the slot for other adjectives like “small” or “red.” It has a different slot all its own. My little dream-team trio of classmates was working on the Klingon problem set, and we were trying to use a Linguistics term for “so-called,” that wasn’t “adjective.” I suggested a term I’d seen in a discussion of Nishnaabemwin, which was the noun-class “Contemptive.” I mean, Klingons are big on contempt. I could imagine one saying, “You call this pile of sticks a chair?” And then after that, they might forever refer to it as “that so-called chair.” (I’m not a huge Trekkie, but I knew more a...

(“The Mushroom,” the “multipurpose” room - but mainly the lunchroom - at Mercer Island High School, back in the day.) My 50 th high school reunion will be in June, and the planning committee is sending out info. I’m going with Steve, my grade school pal and faithful reunion buddy. If Steve’s there, even across the room, I’m fine. I know we’ll get to debrief later. One thing the planning committee sent out was a list of everyone in our class who has died – or at least, everyone they know about. They asked us, gently, to look it over and let them know if they’ve missed anyone. My class had over 500 people, peak Boom.   I didn’t know all my classmates, but I knew many. I went to five of the six island grade schools. (They kept building new ones to hold all the Boom kiddos, and redrawing the lines for which school served my street. I hated being the new kid.) In junior high, the kids from grade school #6, the only ones I hadn’t met yet, were all sent to South Mercer, my school. ...