Tag: English

One evening I was riding the métro home, minding my own business, when a very, very drunk man got on.  He was carrying an open bottle of some sort of hard liquor, and occasionally took a swig.  (This and other obscure vocabulary items discussed in the English notes below.)  He was so plastered that he could barely stay on his seat as the train swerved.  He ranted incoherently–really incoherently.  (After he left, I asked the guy next to me: Pardon me sir, was he speaking French?  (If it’s in italics, it happened in French.) He gave me that look that people in Paris (and New York) give you when approached by a stranger before deciding that you’re OK, and then said: Of a sort.)

A young woman got on the train and took a seat.  She had her phone to her ear, and was talking.  The drunk, ranting guy leaned over, put his fingers to his lip, and said: Shhhhhh.

Bizarre, hein?  No–in a Parisian context, this actually wasn’t surprising at all.  The general French approach to politeness is: don’t do anything that would inconvenience the other person.  A very noticeable way that this works out is that in general, the French tend to communicate more quietly than Americans do.  Indeed, the first thing that I notice when I get off the plane in the US is how loud everyone is–I clear Customs, go sit in the United club, and find myself listening to the cell phone conversations of every random stranger within earshot. In Paris, if you see someone talking on the phone on the train, the chances are excellent that they’re not French–it’s just not done.  So, it wasn’t that bizarre for a shitfaced lunatic to interrupt his raving to say shhhhh to someone talking on the phone on the métro—he might have been hammered, but she was being rude.  In America, someone would have said some equivalent of “it’s a free country, she can talk on the phone if she wants to.”  People did hush him up when he got too carried away, but no one criticized him for saying shhhhh to the girl on the phone–that’s just logical, quoi...

For an extended discussion of the “don’t inconvenience the other guy” principle in French culture, see Raymonde Carroll’s Cultural misunderstandings: The French-American experience, or the original French version, Évidences invisibles: Américains et Français au quotidien.  Carroll’s book is the uber-citation on American/French cultural differences.

I thought about the drunk guy on the train and his shhhhh just now when I stepped out on my balcony (I have the good luck to have an apartment on the étage noble) for a cigarette–and overheard a delivery guy in the street below speaking on his phone.  Avant qu’elle apparaisse, he said–before she appears.  Even though I’m in France, where correcting other people’s grammar is just part of daily intercourse, I suppressed the urge to yell avant qu’elle N‘apparaisse–who doesn’t hate to see a good opportunity to use the ne expletif be wasted?–on the theory that this guy’s day was already going poorly enough without the shame of having some random foreigner fuck with his langue de Molière.  A time and a place for everything.

For the meaning of étage noble and the significance of what floor you live on, see this post on Parisian apartment buildings.  English notes below.

English notes

swig: the amount drunk at one time; a gulp.  (Merriam-Webster)  Some examples from the English Preposition Corpus, courtesy of Sketch Engine, purveyor of fine linguistic data sources and search engines therefor (note the lack of an E at the end–therefor is a different word from therefore):

• I scowled into the night, took a swig of my beer and dumped the rest over the side of the deck .
• I picked up the bottle beside me and took another long swig.
•  If, after a stiff swig of nectar, we were to watch further developments, we’d find that in another 100,000 years or so, or even longer, exactly the same thing would happen again, and the compass would swing back suddenly to its original position.

How I used it in the post: He was carrying an open bottle of some sort of hard liquor, and occasionally took a swig. 

plastered: slang for drunk.  Some examples from the enTenTen corpus (just under 20 billion words of English scraped from the Web), again courtesy of Sketch Engine:

• Once Dolly and I got really plastered together.
• An hour or so later, the Englishman is really plastered. 
• Jonathan is so ugly; I could only have sex with that double bagger if I was really plastered. 
• And by “former glory,” of course, we mean “a time when college-aged people used beer pong as an excuse to get so plastered they sometimes made sexual overtures toward bar stools.
• Only to realise the switch happens yet again and you’re there staring at the mouth of Gingy the Gingerbread Man (Midgett in a triplicate role with Sugar Plum) so plastered on that baking sheet like an angry drunk.

How I used it in the post: He was so plastered that he could barely stay on his seat as the train swerved. 

shitfaced: also slang for drunk.  Don’t use this one in front of my grandmother.

• The night ended with Patty directing my drunk ass to grab the mattress and set up the bed while I was completely stumbling and shitfaced.
• Let me get this straight — this stuff supposedly gives you more energy … so you can stay out later, drink more and get more thoroughly shitfaced?
• The end of the week and I’m tired, over-worked and really just in need of deep sleep so I can get to work the next day with a fresh brain that can fire on all six creative cylinders but I opt to get shitfaced on free beer instead. 
• In the Black Forest they celebrate by getting shitfaced, setting fire to 800-lb straw-packed oak wheels, rolling them down mountainsides into sleepy villages and making bets on the fates of the panicked peasantry as they flee in terror.

How I used it in the post: It wasn’t that bizarre for a shitfaced lunatic to interrupt his raving to say shhhhh to someone talking on the phone on the métro—he might have been hammered, but she was being rude. 

hammered: ….and, once again: slang for drunk.  

• By the time we got to the dessert, I was, to put it delicately, hammered , as you can see from the picture above.
• Made me want to check out more, especially as I was so hammered that I was in danger of keeling over, and consequently remember very little, other than that it was good.
• I think the only way I’ll ever feel the urge to try that is if I’m already so hammered that it seems like a really good idea.

How I used it in the post: It wasn’t that bizarre for a shitfaced lunatic to interrupt his raving to say shhhhh to someone talking on the phone on the métro—he might have been hammered, but she was being rude. 

Conflict of interest statement: I don’t have one.  Sketch Engine doesn’t pay me to shill their stuff–I pay them to use it.

No one actually knows how many languages there are in the world.  Linguists generally estimate a number in the range of 5,000 to 10,000.  What people generally do agree about is this: by the end of this century, half of them will be gone.  Extinct.  No longer spoken.

When you teach linguistics, you often find yourself saying things like this:

All human languages have the property of ambiguity.

No language has a voiced stop without having the corresponding unvoiced stop.

Well: we actually know almost nothing, relatively speaking, about most languages.  Whether there are 5,000 languages today, or 10,000, most of them are what linguists call “undescribed:” that is, we know that they exist, but not much else about them.  “We” in the sense of linguists–that is, people who study language as a system.  (Obviously, the speakers know something about them.)

Consequently, I always find myself needing to give a disclaimer: of the 1,000 or so languages about which we know something, out of the 5,000-10,000 languages in the world, all of them have the property of ambiguity… Clunky, but more plausible than all or none.  As a scientist, I don’t really like “universal quantifiers,” anyway–always, never, all, none… They just aren’t true that often.  No language has a voiced stop without having the corresponding unvoiced stop: a well-known fact, which turns out not to be true: Kukú (a language of the Eastern Nilotic family, with 30,000 or so speakers, mostly in the town of Kajo-Kaji (several other possible spellings) in South Sudan) has a voiced palatal stop, but no voiceless one.  Ambiguity, though: yep, as far as I know, every human language is ambiguous.

The article was written by Mary Haas, one of the most prolific producers of linguistics PhDs ever (including Marc Okrand, who would go on to create the Klingon language for the Star Trek movies–one of my colleagues used to use it as a source for exam questions).  Haas spent a decade researching some of the indigenous languages of the southeast United States (and an island off the coast of British Columbia), and then was recruited by the War Department to develop a methodology for teaching Thai.  She did so; my anthropological linguistics professor told me that after the war, her approach was abandoned on the theory that she had been teaching her American students to speak a tone language and that for an American to learn to speak a tone language is impossible–clearly Haas was right, and it is not impossible for an American to speak a tone language.  My professor chalked this folly up to the sexism of the time, and she was probably right.  Haas worked with the last living speakers of a number of languages; this paper describes her work on one of them.  Read it and weep.

English notes

The Americas: North, Central, and South America.  Some examples from the Sketch Engine web site:

• From the local ports it was shipped to Liverpool and thence into larger vessels overseas, including West Africa where it became a key component in the triangular trade involving slaves to the Americas.
• Her work explores contemporary cultural production in the Americas to analyze how artists and activists use a variety of media, the Internet, Closed Circuit TV, the street, and theatre, to challenge traditional notions of politics in relation to location, simulation, and embodiment.
• The members represent not only the various disciplines (such as history, anthropology, archaeology, sociology and law) but also the various regions of the world (Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean, Europe, the Indian Ocean, the Arab states and Asia).

How I used it in the post: No, “American linguistics” does not mean linguistics done by Americans, or done in America: it means the study of the indigenous languages of the Americas. 

poignancy: from the adjective poignant, meaning

• The Schubert in particular was very affecting: in the second movement, the poignancy of an old man now 87 playing the searing music of a young man facing early death was almost too much to take.
• The threshold between life and death imparts poignancy to the utterances of the dying.
• If we don’t survive, we can imagine the same faint chance the Voyagers have of being detected and studied by some other intelligence, a thought that adds an almost unbearable poignancy to some of these images.
• But a second viewing reveals that what he has witnessed is his own funeral, the final scene of the film, adding an unbearable poignancy to a very potent image of tragic inevitability.
• It was meant to be a romantic comedy, and it definitely has those elements, but it ended up having a bittersweet poignancy as well, as Paisley deals with the death, bequests and scandals of her great-aunt.

How I used it in the post: “For poignancy, it’s hard to beat articles like this one from IJAL, the International Journal of American Linguistics.”  

When in doubt, always chalk Trump’s motives up to “my dick is bigger than Obama’s, believe me.’ https://t.co/MXcb5ipOVl

— Brandon David Wilson (@Geniusbastard) February 13, 2018

And I decided to chalk my insecurity up to my own jealousy. Jealous of people who go for it despite being worried

— bridget boltz (@BridgetKBoltz) September 20, 2017

i would love to chalk this up to outlandish stupidity, but the facts show that this is a really a sinister implementation of trump’s anti-immigrant agenda. https://t.co/voq3xWpmvY

— bardlar flankinson (@BFlankinson) February 27, 2018

I’ll cut Rahjaun some slack .. he been getting teased all his life .. so we’ll chalk his bullying up to having a rough childhood

— Jasmine. #Her (@jazzlovesyu) July 19, 2012

and every time you chalk his bullshit up to mental health, you are actually letting him and his cronies off the hook for the damage they’re doing so maybe think about that

— what that D[ata] do (@meadowlion) January 6, 2018

I’m gonna chalk all this bullshit up to my hormones.

— Gabrielle Voutsinas (@gabbyvoutsinas) July 22, 2016

ThinK Trump’s gonna chalk this one up to his policies? https://t.co/oiGJkqndrz

— Magdalene Visaggio (@MagsVisaggs) February 2, 2018

I chalk 50% of the bullshit up to misunderstandings and the other up to folk’s need to be liked.

— God Modified Original (@DocMouseBish2U) March 15, 2016

You can chalk this one up to Trump’s isolationism doctrine. A few more of these kind of happenings, and the US won’t be trading with ANYBODY around the globe.

— WhobbaBobba (@WhobbaBobba) January 23, 2018