bloodyrosemccoy | Entries tagged with linguistics

Meanwhile, while I was sick my meme backlog has piled up. I hereby must respond to the memes or ~~my ego will be unsatisfied~~ I will have failed the internet. So let’s see, in order that they were received:

nobleplatypus demands my handwriting answer the following questions:
1. Write your username.
2. Write your 2 favourite bands/groups of the moment.
3. Write something you ♥, AKA lemme see your heart!
4. Write the name of your favourite person of all time.
5. Write the name of your recent favoured person.
6. Tag 6 people to do this meme.

She did not, however, stipulate that I had to answer with the truth.

That’s right, dudes, I have a LISA FRANK notebook. You are jealous.

bottledgoose had this meme:
1. Leave me a comment saying anything random, like your favorite lyric to your current favorite song.
2. I respond by asking you five personal questions so I can get to know you better.
3. You will update your LJ with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and offer to ask someone else in the post.
5. When others comment asking to be asked, you will ask them five questions.

… and asked me these questions:
1) write a letter to me in one of your fun alien scripts!
2) tell me what it means, lol

Okay!

In the Roman alphabet:

Kwiryi Andee
Ka gwŕkarris mezhwubnug ashthekyu,
ishŕl mezhyak midzandghŕa Gherresa.
Lye ka sŕlash rrañif Rroerth tan ethlyi,
dher ki kipal ozkorris olye,
ish juvei esa ghesh frodha sŕyul olye kipal rrañirris ka.
Prat rroareafishŕl jeltsughazho.
Amelia

And it means:

( Hah! Now you HAVE to click! )

Current Mood: cheerful
Current Music: Real McKenzies ~ Cross the Ocean

Good to see I’m not the only one who thinks Strunk & White were full of shit: 50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice

Being a linguist can be exhausting.

Also, as long as it’s their anniversary, I hereby remind you that I am trying to make “strunk” into a verb that means “to hypercorrect; to ‘correct’ something that does not need correcting.” I feel the irony if this works will be all too delicious. Happy anniversary, boys.

Current Mood: sleepy

I had this argument in a high school English class, you see. Or, rather, I heard it. I walked in on a group of people arguing about “Daylight Saving(')s Time” and whether it was “savings,” like the savings in the bank, I guess, or “saving’s,” as though “daylight saving” was a single noun phrase and this was its time to begin. One girl was eloquently arguing for the latter, with another girl piping slightly more tentative backup; the rest were arguing against.

Me? I was the pedantic nerd who pointed out that neither is correct, and that the official term is “Daylight Saving Time.” You could argue for a hyphen in there: “Daylight-Saving Time,” but either way, it makes grammatical sense. Even “Daylight Savings Time” never made much sense to me.

But it got me wondering about the perception of the s. I figure it’s in there for pronunciation purposes, because it’s a lot harder to say the phrase without it. But since it’s become so colloquial that we all know it, and I wondered how it was parsed in people’s heads.

As for me, given that it’s colloquial anyway, I have decided to parse it in the most modern sense of the term. Ladies and gentlemen, when I curse this pointless clock-switching, I shake my fist at my alarm and bellow, “Damn you, Daylight Savingz Tiem!”

Hey, it makes just as much sense.

And anyway, I'm nocturnal, so the question of daylight saving is sort of a moot one anyway.

Current Mood: nerdy

[Poll #1362615]

Special Note To Pedantic Nerds: No, this is not a trick question. It’s a subjective question. We’ve all heard this phrase, but I want to know which it is in your head when you hear or say it, regardless of the official phrase.

Current Mood: curious

For all your conlangers and linguistics nerds, here’s an interesting breakdown of pronouns according to their antecedents in Venn diagram form. (I admit, the diagrams themselves were a little difficult for me to grasp at first—possibly because I had to translate the 2-D visualization from the Synesthesia Dimension where it’s been for me all my life.) And a place you can discuss it here.

In short, the OP has broken down exactly how many parties are referred to in each pronoun—“we,” for example, has several different uses:
-“I and you”
-“I and you and other(s)”
-“I and other(s) who are not you

Lotta work for one pronoun.

However, I do know of a language that fills out the Fig. 1 diagram almost perfectly—Hawaiian. I posted the breakdown in boring non-Venn form on the discussion, and here it is for you.

au - 1st singular (“I”)
kāua - 1st inclusive dual (“you and I”)
kākou - 1st inclusive plural (“you and I and ~~George~~ other(s)”)
māua - 1st exclusive dual (“s/he and I”)
mākou - 1st exclusive plural (“I and others who are not you”)
‘oe - 2nd singular (“thou”)
‘olua - 2nd dual (“you two”)
‘oukou - 2nd plural (“y'all”)
ia - 3rd singular (“s/he”; “it”)
lāua - 3rd dual (“they” for two)
lākou - 3rd plural (“they” for three or more)

I also very much like the demonstrative list at the end. I have done a lot of playing with the dimensions of demonstratives—abstract demonstratives (referring to nonphysical entities) and the difference between things that are actually there or absent, or whether it’s real or fictional. A few of my conlangs—:rimulet, for example—take distinctions like that to crazy extremes and have an entirely different set of actions for fictional or hypothetical scenarios—not an original idea, but one taken above and beyond.

Which is a lot of what conlanging is—you don’t need to be utterly alien in order to make something interesting and original.

Current Mood: nerdy
Current Music: Harry Belafonte ~ Jump In The Line

So I’ve been poking a bit at the pídebis’ most common language—all the names I’ve done for their people so far follow this sound system, although I’ve regularized them a bit for the sake of ease of reading in normal stories (taken away diacritics, used equivalents for the taps and other oddball letters).

I have yet to name this language. So far I’ve mostly got the sound system down—but what a sound system!

The idea behind this one was a weird one, mostly inspired by the idea that y cn ndrstnd wrds vn f thyr mssng vwls. Some scripts, like Hebrew and Arabic, even omit vowels from their writing, or at least sort of shuffle them off to the side. So I thought, why not make a language that goes to extremes with that?

( WARNING: Grand Act Of Nerdery Back Here )

Current Mood: geeky
Current Music: Annie Lennox ~ Why

Hey, cool.

I seem to have stumbled into a linguistics project.

A few months ago

ellenmillion posted a question for the language nerds on language change. I don’t think she was looking for a really long answer, but you know how it is when someone asks a question about your area of expertise. I launched into an enthusiastic description of the factors that affect language over time, and volunteered to be around to answer any questons she had.

And that’s how I wound up on a team of Ellen and three language nerds, working to create a conlang for a possible future project.

I gotta say, I’m suddenly energized and feeling a lot happier about life now. I owe Ellen a debt of gratitude: she actually made this customer service rep feel like her linguistics degree can serve some purpose. And building a conlang is always just a ton of fun on its own. I’ve never collaborated on one before, but it’s interesting to work through to a consensus on thsi forum. And since the language is for ~~commercial~~ public use, there are different design parameters at work than what you’d have if your language was just for your own enjoyment, or as that sort of backstage information for a story that only manifests on the surface as a tendency for character names to not look like they were pulled out of your ass.* So we’ve been working on not only consistency, but ease of use for native English speakers—not too weird or different a sound system, not too crazily different syntax. It adds an interesting extra dimension to the process when you have to consider the idea of facilitating the learning ...

Plus, it’s fun! I’m not sure how much more I can say about it now than some generalities like that, but I’ll let y’all know when you can take a look at it. It feels good to be able to do a job using what I studied for years—I hope I can show it off when it goes public.

*Most names in stories like Doctors! are carefully worked out—if not the full language, like the arhodes', then at least the sound conventions. Which is a bit harsh on me for the pídebes, whose most common language has a single vowel with ten allophones. That is, the vowel depends on what consonants are in the syllable and the syllable’s tone—which means I have to have a cheat sheet with me when I make up names.

… I may give a longer description of this in a later entry, because it’s an interesting project of its own if you happen to be a language nerd.

Current Mood: energetic
Current Music: Shakira ~ Que Vuelvas

dimethirwen linked to this hilarious article: Men Explain Things To Me.

I’ve been noticing that for years, ever since reading bits of Deborah Tannen. I get it all the time—there are so many men who will try to turn conversations with me into a lecture. (Favorite version: a man will hear I’m an expert in something and begin to lecture me on it.) I have been frustrated by this in the past, but since I myself am a bona fide grade-A pompous know-it-all, I usually turn the attempts at lectures into an Infobattle.* It's fun to see how it throws them off.

Partly, they're thrown off because the guys don’t even know they’re doing it. They just assume that it’s the way conversations go. I think it’s important that I let you dudes know this, in case any of you have that tendency. For myself, I don’t always contest you, even when I see you starting in on it—it happens too often. If I argued every time, I’d be exhausted. But. Even when I don’t do that, I want you guys to know something: I’m seeing it. And I’m simultaneously annoyed that guys feel they can do that because I’m a woman (even if it’s not on purpose)—and uproariously amused that they are carrying on about stuff they clearly know nothing about. You may want to keep an eye on that.

And now, in honor of my rant and my geekiness, have parts one, two, and three (three is a bit repetitive; you want to go to about 8:00 into it) of a hilarious and slightly squashed MST3k short** that shows that maybe this tendency is not so unnoticed after all. Enjoy this instructional video on how not to be instructional. (“Sure! That makes the dishes hygienically clean.”) Lectures like this have happened to me, and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one.

*Sometimes this goes overboard. That’s what I did with the guy who told me the language in my story wasn’t cohesive. After the critique he told me that I should learn about this thing he’s into called “conlanging,” which would really help me with my language skills. I informed him that Rredrra was, in fact, my seventh or eighth conlang; furthermore, it is one of my most full-bodied, my first attempt at an ergative-absolutive language with a locative case in place of genitive, and that its sound system had a number of non-English consonants—and non-English consonant clusters—that were difficult to represent using Roman orthography, and it also had several-step rules for sound changes palatalization of sonorants that play out at the onset of syllables or the changing of word-final voiced fricatives to voiceless. Left him scrambling a bit to reclaim his upper hand. I call that move my BLINDING INFODUMP.

**Yes, I’m obsessed.

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: Jackson Browne ~ Everywhere I Go

Absolutely Incredible Kid Day
Companies That Care Day
Great American Meatout
Maundy Thursday
Holy Thursday
National Agriculture Day
Ostara (Wiccan)
Purim (begins at sundown - Jewish)
Proposal Day
Spring Begins
Vernal Equinox
Snowman Burning
Ta'Anit Ester (Fast of Esther - Jewish)
Birthday - Fred "Mr." Rodgers (children's host)
Independence Day (Tunisia)

Last night

chibicharibdysand I were at the bus station waiting to go to our writers’ group,* and I was feeling a little mopey because it has turned out that I am her replacement—she’s moving back to Hawai’i over spring break, and I won’t get to hang out with her anymore, and we were just becoming in-real-life-meatspace friends!—when this dude came straight over to me, smiling.

Let me just reiterate something here: I suck at faces. Even when my vision is 20/20, I have trouble recognizing people who are not a) part of my immediate family, or b) people I’ve been familiar with for years. I used to have trouble in clothing retail because I didn’t recognize customers when they came out of the dressing room. I hate movies that have casts featuring a bunch of similar people in similar outfits, because I can never tell who is the villain.** So when random guys start moseying up to me in the bus stop, I am going to be just a bit nervous. Is this an acquaintance? A stranger asking for the time? A stranger asking for money? A stranger with a gun asking for money? A relative? It could be any of those things.

And then, when he says “Habari gani?”—which is something you say to a random person in Kenya where you’re on an old town street discovering the meaning of the phrase “solar radiation” while somebody walks by with a handcart full of water tanks and kids behind you are yelling “Mzungu give me a shilling,” and not something you say to a random person at a rainy bus stop in Eugene with college kids and crazy people around carrying home fruits they got in the grocery store—I get really confused.

Fortunately, that only lasted for a second, and I was already responding with the automatic, “Nzuri sana!” Then I figured it out: this was my old Swahili teacher, Marko, whom I have’t seen in over a year.

Ha ha! I knew that! Who says I didn’t, huh?

Have you ever run into an old language teacher? It’s awkward. Their first instinct is always to start chatting away with you in Spanish, or Japanese, or Swahili, or ASL, and you find yourself suddenly attempting to wrench your thoughts into that language’s structure and remembering how the hell you say anything, in any language, including English.*** And this is your teacher, after all, so you’re under the vague impression that this is a pop quiz. SHIT! So your brain goes to Red Alert and races around trying to locate its somewhat buried files on How To Speak Foreign, and when it finds the language it’s in a huge case—labeled “FOREIGN”—that contains all the information you’ve amassed about all languages other than English, ever, in a huge tangled pile. Then, like the badass doctors in the movies who race the clock to save someone with whatever the hell is lying around, your brain plunges a hand into that mess, seizes a random handful of linguistic information, and flings it at your mouth. “Stall them with this!” it shouts as it assembles squads to sort out which language is which.

And so you blurt out a bizarre pastiche of words and syntax, and your teacher smiles as you flounder around until the boys at the lab in your head can crank out some semblance of the correct language.

Of course, once I got past that initial lurch, things went a little more smoothly. I had spent four months speaking some Swahili, so I managed to get a few sentences out as we sat on the bus and chatted—though my attempts to include

chibicharibdysand speak Swahili at the same time were futile. It was good to see him again.

The only trouble is, now I still am thinking in Foreign. It’ll take me a few days to sort out all my vocabulary and grammar again. Thank goodness this happened after the essays.

*Contrary to the fears I expressed earlier, I gotta say: this writers’ group is a pretty cool one. The critiques are good, and earnest, and while they aren’t always the same as my reviews, none of them is ridiclously pompous. I mean, you know, not any more pompous than is normal for writers.

**Thanks, Star Trek, for the color coding and the forehead makeup. It helps.

***Also, if it is ASL, you are invariably carrying a tote bag, a hot dog, and a travel mug.

Current Mood: content
Current Music: Tom Lehrer ~ When You Are Old And Gray

Bowdler's Day
UN World Population Day
Anniversary - Day of the Five Billion
Birthday - President John Quincy Adams (6th President)

cjtremlett asked for this, so you get it—the breakdown of the :rimulet name Lwefir, qre :am, Náileyè-Miye!aq-lal-Náiváim-Edisqi.* Beware, this is heavy on the linguistic terminology, and I’m too lazy to explain it because most of you don’t care.

( Boring Stuff )

So more precisely, her last name wouldn't be “always knows what to say,” but “knows words which are right to say.” Which does say a lot about her.

Fortunately, in the stories you only get that as a bonus. For all intents and purposes, her name is Lwefir, which is easy enough to say. So I’ll let the rest of you go with that.

*Lwefir is a rúmúqilú, a mousy arboreal alien who walks on her arms when she isn’t swinging. She is the supervisor of Section 42 of The Hospital, where the main characters in Doctors in SPACE! all work.

Current Mood: drained

Great American Backyard Campout
Let It Go Day
Midsummer Day/Eve Celebrations
UN Public service Day
Victory Day (Estonia)

I think the Daleks’ native language* is tonal. Think about it. Not only do they soar up and down the scale like Cheb Mami having a seizure, but whenever they say “Dalek” they do the first syllable with a long vowel and a rising-falling (I think) tone: daAAa-lek.” As different accents show up in TARDIS Fish Telepathic Yes-We-Admit-We’re-Cheating Copout,** I can only assume that their accents have to do with a certain tonal variation.

Yes, not even this show is safe. Be afraid.

The Not-Geeky Part

And now that I have your attention, you geeks, I’d like to add that I’m going to Moab for a week, to do three things:

Hang with the family,
Meet The Dude’s girlfriend, who’s going to drop by from New Mexico or somewhere, and
Read.

I used to do bike rides with my family, but I am tired, it is June and therefore hot, and I have six thousand books I want to read. I may wander a bit in the desert, but mostly I’m just gonna sit and enjoy baking in the heat. The condo we’ll be in might have wireless, but if not you can all picture me just lying there enjoying myself and know why I’m not updating.

*Probably in this case just Dalek. Usually I rail against the “All Romulans speak Romulan, all Klingons speak Klingon, and all Humans speak Human” fallacy, but for a species that’s all about the homogeneity, I’m pretty sure they’d stick with one.

**Which makes me SO HAPPY. I love the many faces of British accents in this show.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: The Eagles ~ Tequila Sunrise

Zombie Apocalypse
Creating With Your Heart Day
Saint Anthony of Padua Feast Day
Birthday - Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen (actresses)

What I Learned This Term:

The average life span of a house rabbit is 10-12 years. (I knew this, but now I have learned it.)
In comic art a good way to keep effect lines focused is to stick a tack at the focal point and rotate the straight edge around it.
Superman originally couldn’t fly; he would jump around like a flea. I had wondered about that because of the “able to leap tall buildings” bit, which seemed a little redundant if you could go sailing off through the ionosphere whenever you wanted to.
Subway sandwiches actually aren’t bad.
Budgies glow in the dark.
In linguistic subgrouping, shared innovation shows a closer relationship between languages than shared retention.
Wraparound pants are the coolest pants in the world. And they can help you with your worldbuilding projects!
There are two styles for wedging clay: the Western, also called “ramshead,” and the Eastern, or “chrysanthemum.” The second terms refer to the shapes the clay takes on.
I use “Fucking” as both an honorific and as a sign of derision. For examples, I give you: Sigourney Fucking Weaver versus Paris Fucking Hilton.
Patrick Fucking Stewart does the voice of Adventure in The Pagemaster, one of my favorite animated movies. This reinforces my theory that classically trained actors are filthy filthy whores. They’ll take any paycheck you offer them. And that’s awesome.
People interpret the word “diet” to mean “please offer me a disapproving opinion without noticing any of the other words in the sentence.”
Cobalt can undergo reversible oxygenation, meaning that it can work as a metalloprotein. Dweijidŕ, Ghiltrol, say hello to your blue blood.
There is one thing I can do better left-handed: I can pull clay into long, thin strips. I always wind up with little knobs and thin bits when I do it right-handed. Presumably this means I can also milk a cow better, since the motion’s almost identical, but we will have to study that further before we know for sure.
Originally, the word for apron was napron, but people saying a napron eventually started hearing it as an apron.
Linguists have actually discussed whether languages have “masculine” or “feminine” characteristics (I’m looking at you, Otto Jesperson).
The answer to the question “If I decide to make a career out of standing on rubber balls balancing tea trays and vases on my nose while swinging a hula hoop on my hips, what is my first step?” is: Wuqiao Acrobatics School.
You know you’re not cut out to watch porn when your first thought after the movie ends is, “Hey, that subplot with the dirty maid and the guy in the cravat and enormous platforms didn’t go anywhere.”
You should definitely make sure to hug your rabbit before you leave after spring break, because you’ll feel slightly better about it when she dies before you get back for summer vacation.
Either I really do have Jubilee’s mutant power of blowing up electronics, or every iPod in the Universe is a piece of shit.
It is actually possible to upstage Johnny Depp as a pirate.
It takes a month to get some psychiatrists to do paperwork.
Fraggle Rock stands the test of time. Rugrats doesn’t.

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: Rusted Root ~ Send Me On My Way

Library of Congress Day
National Teach Children to Save Day
Birthday - Barbra Streisand (singer, actress)

It may have to do with the fact that I started drinking my caffeinated tea right then, but today I perked up in linguistics and gender class right as we got to swear words.

Okay, it wasn’t the caffeine. I’m just a big fan of swear words.

Now this might seem odd for a girl from the white side of Salt Lake, a city so pasty that baby turtles on coasts hundreds of miles away mistake its light for the moon and move inland, a city where one of the biggest scandals during the Olympics was when Mitt Romney said The H-Word.* Or it might seem perfectly reasonable, in a forbidden fruit sort of way—but that’s not true either, because while Utah itself might cuss like Playhouse Disney, my family is full of old pros at it,** and I do not lack experience.

The thing is, I just find every aspect of swearing cool.

You can learn a lot about a culture by what it considers Taboo Language—look at the Victorian fears of the word “pants” or “leg,” or some languages’ words for certain relatives, and one I’ve heard of where the world for “left hand” is bad but don’t quote me on that. I love making up swears for my conlangs from this principle—basing curses on certain fun aspects of the societies, such as the arhode’s distaste for getting wet resulting in “go soak yourself” being a lot more vulgar than it is in English, or the sprites’ equivalent of “son of a bitch” meaning something along the lines of “black personality.”***

The sound of swear words can be fun, too. They’re often words that get spat out, so they slur if they’re polysyllabic. “Shit” is the most evocative of its literal description for me, but “damn” and “fuck” and their various forms are more fun to say.

Profanity is neurologically interesting, as well. Such interjections are actually stored in a different part of your brain, which is why it’s so easy to access “God dammit sonuvabitch” when you bang your shin. That’s also an explanation for the more well-known (but, might I add, least common) form of Tourette’s syndrome, when the tics include uncontrolled swearing or repetition of a phrase such as “you know,” and why people with various aphasias can still swear. (That’s also where you store song lyrics or poems you “know by heart,” and why after fifteen years I can still sing the entirety of “Yakko’s World.”) Once again, This Is Your Brain On Language is awesome.

I also like creative swearing, like they do on Firefly, which doesn’t seem like something you store but that you have time to think about. Favorites from that show include (translated from Mandarin), “Holy mother of god and all her wacky nephews!” and “Explosive diarrhea of an elephant!” It’s nasty, but funny.

And, of course, there’s the naughty rebellious feeling you get when you do swear. Street cred. Acceptable badness. It’s fun to play with the taboo. Even telling people that swearing is interesting sounds slightly rebellious, and you’re delighted with that.

I am, anyway. “Damn,” I seemed to be saying in class, “this shit is fanfuckintastic.”

*I am not making this Olympic scandal up.

**Slam. “God dammit sonuvabitch!” “Hey, everybody, Dad’s home!”

***The actual phrase is “Fulo vetuk!” If you think you know why that’s a joke, then present yourself to Ian McKellen for your prize. If you know why that’s a joke, then there is no hope for you.

Current Mood: cheerful
Current Music: Mannheim Steamroller ~ G Major Toccata

Commodore Perry Day
National Siblings Day
Salvation Army Founder's Day
Anniversary - Safety Pin Patented
Children's Day (Florida)

Dude! Sweet!

*dorks out*

Also, screw you, Chomsky. Just on general principle.

EDIT: Link be fixed. You can all hear the whistle people now. Damn I wanna learn Piraha.

Current Mood: impressed
Current Music: George Harrison ~ Gone Troppo

St. Patrick’s Day

Camp Fire USA/Founder’s Day

Evacuation Day

National Quilting Day

Save the Florida Panther Day

National Day (Ireland)

You know you’re a linguistics major when you go out shopping wearing all blue, and when somebody reminds you that it’s St. Patrick’s Day and playfully demands to know why you aren’t wearing green, your immediate reaction is to think, “Look, dude, there’s a lot of languages out there that would agree with me that blue and green are close enough.”

If I were a history major, I would have thought, “The old traditional color of St. Patrick’s Day was blue!” But I’m not, so you get yet another insight into how the whole famous business about naming colors works. Congratulations! You learned something new either way.

Current Mood: rushed
Current Music: Ringo Starr ~ I Think Therefore I Rock & Roll

Hoodie-Hoo Day (Northern Hemisphere)
International Pancake Day
Mardi Gras
Paczki Day
Pisces Begins
Shrove Tuesday

Today’s linguistics question: How many of y’all use “I’ma” as a contraction of “I’m gonna”? As in “I’ma go to the store tomorrow” or “I’ma bake some cookies later.”

We were talking today about linguistic change and brought up the fossilization of linguistic forms, and I brought this one up. I wasn’t sure if it was an idiosyncrasy of myself and a few of my friends or a larger phenomenon, but apparently a few others in class used it, too. So I got curious. Is this a widespread phenomenon? Is “gonna” the new formal? And where in the world did I pick up “y’all,” anyway?

These are the questions which need to be answered, folks.

Current Mood: damp

Bubble Gum Day
Freedom Day
Hula in the Coola Day
Robinson Crusoe Day
Women's Heart Health Day

Post-It notes are an interesting phenomenon to me. Unlike a nice long journal entry, they provide a snapshot of the inside of my head the same way doodles do for Liz.

People who ask me what goes on in my mind, though, probably would not be able to tell from something like the latest one, scribbled over the last few days:

Remember ~~the pharmacy~~ Tunnel

17!

lat. fric?

thl (like Welsh twilight

or athlete) light =

only beween syll. ^ blue

→ ‘th’ initially (season)

“soak” = expletive. Go get wet

or get soaked = go fuck

yourself. (Not ‘go soak your

head’)

Apparently, that’s what the inside of my head looks like before I organize it.

Discussion Question: Why do we say ‘go soak your head’? I came up with the phrase for Rredrra independently of the English idiom, which I had forgotten about. “Get soaked” makes sense as a rude comment in a species which, broadly speaking, finds being wet extremely distasteful and feels bathing is as private and taboo a matter as using the toilet. But why in English? Is it a suggestion to go drown yourself? Or what?

Current Mood: content
Current Music: Animal Planet ~ Blue Planet

Get To Know Your Customer Day
Pooh Day
Anniversary - Lewis & Clark Expedition Commission

Scene: Sociolinguistics class. The class is discussing language loss through generations of immigrants.

Girl: What about kids whose parents have learned a language and teach them to the kids, so the kids are native speakers but the parents aren’t?

Amelia: Like the native Klingon speakers?

Current Mood: geeky

No Interruptions Day
Saint Thomas of Canterbury Feast Day
Tick Tock Day
Anniversary - YMCA
Birthday - President Andrew Johnson (17th President)
Admission Day (Texas)

Dude! This parrot is smart enough to say “flied.” Flied! Do you know how cool it is that he can understand past tense and even process the patterns applied to them? So he was ultimately wrong on the correct grammatical pronunciation—the point is the pattern. That is Really Cool.

Yet another hint that animals* are smarter than certain people think they are.**

But parrots—I often wonder what my budgie is thinking when we talk to her. Maybe we should give her more mental stimulation, unless that blue fluffy prismatic tribble Mom put in her cage is enough.

*Except quail. Quail are dumbasses.

**Yeah, I’m looking at you, Noam Chomsky

Current Mood: curious
Current Music: Cake ~ Mahna Mahna

Saint John Feast Day
Birthday - Louis Pasteur (chemist)
Birthday - Lee Salk (child psychologist)

So The Guy at our store—the one male sales associate—is a tall, cute, courteous hyperMormon. I like him in a passive way, but he’s got this habit that drives me nuts, and that is lecturing me every time I ask a question. He doesn’t moralize, I hasten to clarify. He will merely answers a question such as “How do I do Step 12 in this complicated new register procedure involving a gift card?” with a detailed description of, not Step 12, but Steps 1-22, 21 of which I already know how to do. When he can, he not only unleashes the whole procedure, but also will in fact gallantly step in and do it for me. Protests such as “Yeah, I know all that, I was just wondering if I could scan the gift card’s bar code, which you have confirmed” do not avail me.

Basically, we stand there sounding like a case study from a book by Deborah Tannen.

Our whole relationship, such as it is, is made up of the phenomenon* of miscommunication. People talk about anthropological oddities like Those People Who Have A Different Language For Men And Women as though it’s something unique, when the truth is that nobody is speaking the same language. Everyone has a different goal when they talk, and mine is often different from his.

Part of it is that no two people have the same sense of humor. Most of what I say is some joke, which is bad when The Guy has no a very different sense of humor. And on top of this, his enjoyment of lecturing pounces on one of my favorite kinds of jokes, which is to subtly deliberately misunderstand something obvious.** Instead of recognizing some bizarre comment as a little bit of surrealist absurdity, he thinks I genuinely am stupid, and feels that it is his duty to explain it to me. And then I say, “Dude, I already knew that,” but of course he thinks I’m covering. It’s obnoxious.

At least he usually waits for me to make the daft comments. I have a lot of uncles who don’t, and prefer to just start with a lecture about an innoucuous conversational comment, no matter how much they know or don’t know about it. I don’t know if it’s because I’m a girl, and therefore obviously need this instruction from a knowledgeable man, or if they do it with other guys, too. Either way, that also gets annoying.

I just hope the Dude doesn’t start up doing it any more than he already does. A little is good, but I may have to kill him if he tries to go too far.

*Doo DOO doo-doo doo!

**No, I don’t mean like those damn motivational speakers who would come to your elementary school and ask if anyone could tell him how to make a peanut butter sandwich or something, and then when the kids said something like “Get the peanut butter” he’d look confused and pretend not to know how to open the jar, so you’d have to say “Open the jar” and he’d try to break it or something so you’d have to say “Unscrew the lid!” I hated those guys. They probably were using this hilarious gag to teach us some moral, like that you have to use good communication skills or that you should always brush your teeth, but I always was infuriated by the deliberate misunderstanding, and the arbitrariness of when they decided that they now had atomized the instructions enough. It was years before I realized that the term I had been searching for whenever they started up their uproariously funny routine was “fucking dumbshit.”

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: The Beatles ~ Lady Madonna

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