Tag: vocabulary

The odd guy in this picture?  He’s “the motor homunculus.”  The picture represents the proportions of the motor cortex that are dedicated to controlling the movements of the parts of our body whose movements we can control.  The motor cortex is a part of the outer layer of the brain that is used for controlling movement.  Note that not all parts of the body get equal amounts of brain dedicated to them.  Some get more than others, and the relative sizes of the body parts in the picture reflect those unequal amounts.  Which parts get the most?

1. The organs of speech
2. The hand

For decades, people like me have been showing this figure to our Linguistics 101 students and saying: you can tell how important the organs of speech are because as much of the motor cortex is devoted to them as to the control of our hands.  Neurologist Frank Wilson sees it the other way around, though.  His take on it: you can tell how important the hands are because as much of the motor cortex is devoted to them as to the control of our organs of speech.  I like that–it’s always interesting when people see things the opposite of the way that I do.

How do we know how much of the brain is devoted to any organ?  It all goes back to a Canadian-American neurosurgeon by the name of Wilder Penfield.  Penfield was a pioneer of modern brain surgery.  He developed a procedure for treating epilepsy by finding the region of the patient’s brain from which the unfortunate electrical storms originate, and destroying it.  When you’re doing this, you don’t want to destroy a part of the brain that carries out some irreplaceable function, so Penfield developed a procedure for stimulating parts of a patient’s brain and watching what happened.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: but, you can’t see everything that might happen–it’s not like you can watch someone’s pharynx and see what part of the brain we use to control the incredibly complicated process of swallowing a bite of pizza.  That’s a good point.  As Dr. Peter Pressman, a neurologist at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, told me:

You’re right, Zipf–he didn’t exactly pull up each individual muscle.  More like “hand, arm, throat, etc.”  His was a rough map, though revolutionary at the time.  It turns out that more recent work using functional magnetic resonance imaging has led to essentially the same findings–Penfield’s work was amazing.

The take-home point: whether you’re a linguist like me and want to focus on the organs of speech, or a physician who wants to focus on the hand, the amount of brain “real estate” that is devoted to each of them reflects the fact that both of them are central to being a human being.

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Once a year I travel to Guatemala with Surgicorps, a group of surgeons, therapists, nurses, and anesthesiologists who spend a week donating free surgical services for people for whom the almost-free national health care system is too expensive.  We bring with us specialists who can perform techniques that are beyond the skills of the local surgeons.  The team includes Dr. David Kim, who specializes in hand surgery, and Dr. Courtney Retzer-Vargo, an occupational therapist who specializes in rehabilitation of the hand.  These are both exceptionally rare skill sets–Dr. Kim did two separate four-year fellowships (in plastic surgery and in orthopedics) to learn his trade, and Dr. Retzer-Vargo is one of a very small number of people in the world with her specialized skills.  Their work is an important part of what we do because giving someone back the ability to use their hands can mean keeping them alive in this country where most work is manual labor, and if you don’t work, you starve–as do your children.

Surgicorps members pay for their own travel, lodging, and food on these missions–and donate a week of vacation time (that’s a lot in the United States), as well as their professional services.  Donations from generous people like you go entirely to covering the costs of the surgeries and pre- and post-operative care.  This includes supplies, oxygen and anesthetic gases, medications, lab work, and lodging for the family members who accompany them on the long trip to the facility out of which we work.  To give you some perspective: the cost of surgery for one patient works out to $250.  $100 pays for four surgical packs.  $10 pays for all of the pain medications that we will send our patients home with this week.  Want to help?  Follow this link to make a donation–you’ll be surprised at how good it will make you feel.

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English notes

homunculus: a small man.  The concept of tiny little people was an important but wrong idea about how exactly our physical bodies get made: before we actually knew anything about embryology, the idea that we start out as so-tiny-that-we’re-invisible fully formed humans whose development consists simply of getting bigger seemed to make about as much sense as anything else.  (This idea is known as preformation–see the Wikipedia article about it for its history.)

Later conceptions of the homunculus have focussed on the extent to which we can think of it as a “representation” of the human–something that lets us think logically about people by simplifying them down to the elements that are essential to whatever it is that we’re trying to figure out about them.  For example, the motor homunculus simplifies the human to a set of purposeful movements.  Every representation has its benefits–in this case, the ability to have a 1200-word discussion about what the brain can tell us about the parts of humans that are most important to making them…human.  Representations also have their costs.  For example, representing an entire human being as a motor homunculus doesn’t let us say anything about why a human might want to move something.  Life always has its trade-offs–how about trading a few of your spare dollars/euros/quetzales for the warm feeling of contributing to Surgicorps making it possible for a woman to cook her child’s tortillas in the morning, or for a man to earn the money to send that child to school?  Click here to donate.

 

 

You’ll often read dilettantes in the field of evolution talk about “the” function of this or that organ, structure, or whatever.  I say “dilettantes” because it’s simplistic to think in terms of one function for any part of an organism.

Consider the human hand.  Think about how differently it has to function for these two kinds of people:

1. A rock climber
2. A classical pianist

These two folks have to develop their hands to do two things that are essentially polar opposites.  To wit:

1. rock climber: …needs his fingers to be able to (a) support a lot of weight, for (b) prolonged periods of time, in (c) the same position.
2. classical pianist: …needs his fingers to be able to (a) move rapidly, (b) across a wide range of forces, (c) with great precision.

Being able to keep his fingers in the same spot with a lot of weight on them for a long time is what lets a rock climber figure out his next move without plunging into the abyss–presumably to his depth.  Being able to execute very subtle variations in pressure across a wide variety of speeds (see the English notes below for what the verb to execute means in this context) is what allows a classical pianist to express what we call “emotion” in a piece of music.  “The” function of the hand?  It’s an incredibly complex organ capable of many different functions, you dilettante.  (I’m speaking to some hypothetical wanker who thinks they know something about evolution here, not to you, dear reader.)

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I always think about Frank Wilson’s observations on the rock climber versus the pianist in his book The Hand  when I head to Guatemala the first week in August.  I spend one week a year in Antigua, Guatemala, where I serve as an interpreter for a group of surgeons, technicians, nurses, therapists, and anesthesiologists who provide free specialized surgeries for people for whom the almost-free Guatemalan health care system is still too expensive.  A lot of that time I spend with a hand surgeon and with a therapist who specializes in rehabilitation after hand surgery.  Wilson’s observations about the very different kinds of demands that we can place on our hands come to mind in this context because, as Dr. David Kim, our hand surgeon, puts it,

The number one goal in hand surgery is restoration of function.  People can differ quite a bit in terms of the kinds of functions that they carry out with their hands, so I don’t necessarily address the same problems with the same surgical technique.  A tailor and a farm worker need to be able to do very different things in order to return to the normal functions of their lives, and I keep that in mind when I am determining the best surgical approach to addressing their problems.

The majority of people in Guatemala have two options in life:

1. Do manual labor
2. Starve to death

So, when the Surgicorps team gives someone back the lost function of their hand, it is not just a surgical procedure–it is allowing that person to not starve to death, and perhaps to make it possible for their children to go to school–and thus have a few more options in life than the two that I listed above.  Would you like to help support what we do here?  Our volunteers pay all of the costs of their own involvement–we buy our own plane tickets, pay for our food and lodging, etc., and donate all of our services.  Your donation goes straight to supporting surgeries, pre- and post-op care for our patients, and lodging for the family members that accompany them here.  You don’t have to give much to help a lot–$250 US pays all costs of surgery for one patient, and $10 US pays for all of the pain medications that we will send patients home with the entire week.  Follow this link to donate–a small donation is a great way to make your day better!

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English notes

to execute: one of the meanings of this word is to perform or carry out some action.  How I used it in the post: Being able to execute very subtle variations in pressure across a wide variety of speeds is what allows a classical pianist to express what we call “emotion” in a piece of music. 

to death: this prepositional phrase is a structurally unusual way of expressing the idea of dying due to a specific cause or being killed by a specific method.  Here are some examples from Sketch Engine, purveyor of fine linguistic corpora and the tools for searching them.

• 400 people then broke through the barrier and stamped the soldiers to death. “Stamped…to death” means that they killed the soldiers by stomping on them.  (Yes: “to stomp.”  From Merriam-Webster: “to strike or beat forcibly with the bottom of the foot.”)
• Anything approved today will not be implemented until next August at the earliest, but people cannot be left without aid for such a long period unless they are supposed to starve to death. “To starve to death” means to die by starvation.
• On July 10th , 1941, in the Polish town of Jedwabne, at least 340 Jewish citizens were murdered – burned to death in a locked barn after having been publicly beaten and humiliated in the town square – not, as one might have expected, by the country’s Nazi occupiers but by a group of twenty-three Polish men, acting, more or less enthusiastically (“more” seems likely), at the instigation of the German gendarmerie, who were on hand to shoot down anyone who tried to escape from the barn. “Burned to death” means that they were killed by burning.

 

 

What surprises Americans: when I tell them how much, in general, the French love our country.  But, the complaints about all of the English language used in France… The movie subsidies… The laws about how much French-language music has to be played on the radio…  They miss what seems to me the obvious inference: the government support for French cinema, the laws requiring that at least some French-language music show up on the radio, the complaints (from almost no one) about the invasion of the English language–they’re all there because the French love to mix some English with their daily language, because they love American movies, because they know American music better than I do (I’m an American).  The “cultural exception” that allows the French government to financially promote French films and music is there precisely because left to their own devices, many French will consume American entertainment media almost exclusively, and the indigenous entertainment industry would croak (slang for “die”–maybe equivalent to crever?).  No stereotype is true of everyone–but, this one applies to a lot of French people.

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The latest evolution of the laws regarding French-language music on French radio: you can’t just play the same French-language songs over and over again.  Radio stations are required to play a certain percentage of French music.  Many stations have tended to fulfill that requirement by just playing the same classics repeatedly, which makes no one happy.  The radio stations’ excuse: there just isn’t that much good new French-language music.

This is bullshit.  Quebec is at the center of a number of the interesting things happening with respect to French, and one of them is music.  There are some really good–amazing, even, to my ears–Québécois musicians putting out new albums all the time.  I would categorize (’cause us French do love to taxonomize shit) them roughly as follows:

• singer-songwriters
• “folk” musicians
• straightforward rock-and-rollers
• pop

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One of the most interesting of the singer-songwriters: Sally Folk.  She is an ineffably adorable pint-sized brunette who rocks a 1960s glam/girl-group look.  A couple of her songs are the sort of perky, happy tunes that you might expect from someone who looks like that–and the rest are dark, sophisticated, dark, complicated, dark… Did I say “dark”?  One that stirred up a lot of controversy when her third album recently came out is J’aurai ton enfant quand même, “I’ll have your baby anyway,” in which the narrative voice (is that the term?) talks about how she knows that her guy doesn’t want to have a kid, and the relationship is ending, but she’s gotten pregnant anyway.  On dira aux autres is (as far as I can tell) about a hook-up: on dira aux autres qu’on se connaissait déjà, “we’ll tell the others that we already knew each other.”  Nous sommes heureux infidèles: about an affair, obviously.  I don’t even understand her song La cigogne–my French isn’t that good–but it makes me blue every time I hear it.  (I think it’s maybe about a miscarriage?  Phil d’Ange?)  Certes, j’ai fait quelques erreurs//De jugement comme de pudeur–yep, that’s me alright…  Check ‘er out, and scroll down for the English notes, where we’ll discuss perky, to be left to one’s own devices, and to have one’s druthers.

A rare song that sounds as cheery as Sally Folk looks.  The rest mostly make me think about shooting myself–in a good way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8_c6jAZgPw

Try not to think too much about the words in this one–if a better expression of regret has ever been sung, I really don’t want to hear it…

Sally Folk at her “just don’t give a fuck” best (thanks for that expression, L.):

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English notes

perky: this adjective can refer to two things, and in those cases, the meanings are quite different.

When it refers to someone’s personality or attitude, it means…well, here are the synonyms from Merriam-Webster:

…and its antonyms, also from Merriam-Webster:

Seems like a pretty positive word, right?  And, it most certainly can be–I strive to always be perky, personally.  But, culturally, it’s a bit more complicated: perky is often used to describe some who is annoyingly activy, airy, animated, bouncy, etc.  Looking up the word on the Sketch Engine web site, purveyor of fine linguistic corpora and the tools for searching them, I see that the adverbs with the strongest statistical associations to perky are:

1. annoyingly
2. unnaturally
3. impossibly
4. delightfully
5. relentlessly

Delightfully is, of course, good; annoyingly most definitely is not.

So, that’s the meaning when you’re talking about someone’s personality or attitude.  The other meaning applies in reference to a woman’s breasts.  I just showed you the top adverbs associated with perky–when you look at the top nouns, 9 out of 12 of them refer to a woman’s breasts or nipples, one of them refers to butts, and the other two are probably language processing errors.  If you can’t intuit the meaning in this context, Google perky breasts, but do not, not, not do so at work.

It’s almost 5:30 AM in Australia and I have to talk about the Cold War origins of biomedical natural language processing (who knew?) at 9–and I’m too lazy to write up to have one’s druthers and to be left to one’s own devices.  Disappointed?  Say so in the comments.  Or, even better: write them up yourself!

Listening to spoken language while following a written transcript (is that a pleonasm?) is an excellent way to improve your oral comprehension skills.  For those of you who would like to improve your ability to understand spoken American English, here is a story from National Public Radio, with a recording and transcript: How to be a savvy consumer of science news.  To get you off to a good start with the material, here are some of the vocabulary items that you will come across:

savvy: an adjective meaning something like “understanding practical things.”  How it appears in the recording: Our friend from the world of astrophysics, Adam Frank, has offered to provide some tools to help make us all savvier consumers of science news.

to feel like: this expression can have at least a couple of different meanings.  In this case, it means something like to think that.  Here is how it appears in the recording: Adam, why did you feel like this guidance was especially important right now?

Another possible use shows up as to feel like + noun.  For example, to feel like shit means either to feel sick or to feel sorry or sad/upset about something:

• I drank a LOT of beer last night–I feel like shit this morning.  (the feel-sick meaning)
• I must’ve eaten something rotten–I feel like death warmed over.  (the feel-sick meaning)
• I was a real asshole yesterday, and I feel like shit about it now.  (the feel-sorry)
• I feel like shit about what happened to you in the meeting–it was COMPLETELY wrong.

Another possible use is to feel like + present participle, meaning to have a desire to do something.  For example:

• I feel like having cereal for dinner–whaddya you think?
• I really don’t feel like seeing anyone this evening–I’m just gonna stay home.
• Do you feel like going to the party?

such a: an intensifier.  How it appears in the recording:  Science is such a part of our lives.   That means something like “science is very much a part of our lives.”  Some examples:

• Trump is such an asshole.
• I’m gonna give you such a smack.  

Today would have been Nelson Mandela’s 100th birthday. In 1962 he wrote a letter to (a very young) @amnesty. Was such a thrill when I first saw this in the archives, along with other letters from activists he inspired over the decades. pic.twitter.com/Ejsc1iVGyg

— lisa van wyk (@swimlittlefish) July 18, 2018

 

In my daily life, I speak English (my native language) six months out of the year.  The rest of the time, I live my life in French, except for one week in August that I spend doing volunteer work in Guatemala.  In preparation for that week, I stop using French July 1st and spend the entire month trying to push French down and wake Spanish back up.  This morning I laid down for a nap after a couple hours of studying Spanish anatomy vocabulary, and had nightmare after nightmare from which I woke up screaming only inarticulate sounds because in the nightmares, I couldn’t come up with the words that I needed in any of my three languages.

If you read this blog, you’re probably more than a little bit interested in language, its powers–and its complications.  If so: you could do worse than to read Michael Erard.

Erard is a UTexas-Austin-trained linguist and writer who has been especially active in the area of polyglottism.  Besides being an excellent narrative writer, he also has some ideas that are outside of the linguistic conventional wisdom, which is why I find him interesting–in particular, he has made me think a lot about what it means to “speak” a language.  I have always had the standard linguist’s attitude about that–you “speak” the language(s) that you learned natively; anything else… you don’t speak, exactly.  So, ask me whether or not I speak French, and I will say no, despite the fact that it’s the only language that I speak comes out of my mouth 6 months out of the year.  That’s the same thing that I’ll say if you ask me if I speak Spanish, despite the fact that I spend one week a year doing interpreting for a bunch of surgeons in Guatemala.  (You should donate some money–it’s a great group.)  Erard argues that in the global world in which we live today, where many people live their lives in languages that aren’t native to them, the definition of “to speak” a language would more usefully be broadened.  Erard is a smart guy who got his PhD at a hell of a lot better school than I did–he’s worth listening to.  (If you can figure out a way to end that sentence without a preposition: go for it.)

This 2016 article by Erard, currently writer-in-residence at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, is a good example of how he thinks.  The first in a 3-part series, it addresses the question of how the Islamic State manages to function on the battlefield in the absence of a shared language.  The French Foreign Legion and the Israeli Army have always been (and remain) forces with large numbers of members who don’t speak the national language.  They have historically dealt with the problem via formal instruction.  ISIS has gone a different way–as Erard shows, one that is not without precedent.

Erard’s native language is English, and he writes nicely in it.  Let’s start with some of the more-obscure words and phrases that he uses:

As everyone knows by now, ISIL has attracted new and seasoned jihadis from all over the world. But many of its 30,000 recruits (a typical estimate) don’t speak Arabic. So without a common language, how do they fight?

• seasoned: experienced.
• common: shared; the same for everyone.

This question has become particularly interesting in light of a fairly recent change to ISIL’s fighting structure. The change was revealed, in passing, in “Confessions of an ISIS Spy,” a series of Daily Beast articles last November by Michael Weiss, based on his interviews with a supposed ex-ISIL intelligence officer named Abu Khaled.

• particularly: especially; more than some other things.
• fairly: somewhat; not entirely, but not just a little bit, either.
• in passing: from Collins: If you mention something in passing, you mention it briefly while you are talking or writing about something else.
• supposed: claimed to be.

(In passing, I will note that right at this moment, I can hear my cat snoring from the next room.  I didn’t even know that cats snored at all, let alone at high volume!)

Abu Khaled told Weiss that many of the ISIL battle groups, called katibas, were originally organized by language or ethnicity. But in mid to late 2015, ISIL began reorganizing fighters into mixed katibas, either combining muhajireen (foreign fighters) with ansar (local fighters) or mixing muhajireen from different places.

• battle group is actually a technical term, referring to different sizes of units of organization depending on whether you’re talking about the Army or the Navy, but they’re typically probably a lot bigger than what Erard is referring to here, although I couldn’t swear to that as he doesn’t specify what he means.

Because I write about language, languages, and the people who use them, this piqued my interest. To confirm it I contacted Amarnath Amarasingam, a Canadian sociologist who studies foreign ISIL fighters. He told me he had heard from his contacts that linguistically heterogeneous katibas were indeed being assembled on a trial basis.

• to pique (someone’s) interest: piquer la curiosité de quelqu’un, susciter l’intérêt de quelqu’un (WordReference.com).  I’m a little nervous about that second translation–intérêt in French rarely seems to correspond to interest in English, based on the odd looks that I get when I apparently misuse it constantly where I would have used interest in English…

It seems that the operational simplicity of having everyone in a katiba speak the same language also had a downside: It created an insularity among some fighters, who were perceived as running their own agenda. Abu Khaled, who also speaks French, told Weiss he had put together a proposal for a francophone katiba, but that it wasn’t approved. Previous problems were cited with an all-Libyan katiba that had proven more loyal to its own emir (leader) than to ISIL, and also with Russian-speaking katibas that had a tendency to go rogue. To avoid rifts and create a coherent army, ISIL now seemed to feel, it was better to get people to exchange cultures and languages.

• downside: disadvantage.  Often used when you’re comparing the disadvantage to an/some advantage(s), which would then probably be referred to as upside(s).  

But how, in that case, does ISIL turn a gaggle of immigrants with no common language into an effective fighting force?

• gaggle: the term for a group of geese.  You can use it metaphorically for any group that lacks organization.

…and for the answer to Erard’s question, I’ll refer you to his article.  One little point that I’ll mention in there is the appearance in a quote of the word strategic: 

You don’t need to understand the strategic objectives to blow up a school bus. At that level, it’s easy: go there, kill everybody, end of discussion.”

Objectives here are goals.  Strategic, from strategy, is being opposed to tactical, from tactics.  See this post where we talked about that distinction, which is quite important in the quote that Erard gives, from the perspective of its use in Henry Reed’s poem Movement of bodies:

Those of you that have got through the rest, I am going to rapidly
Devote a little time to showing you, those that can master it,
A few ideas about tactics, which must not be confused
With what we call strategy. Tactics is merely
The mechanical movement of bodies, and that is what we mean by it.
Or perhaps I should say: by them.

Strategy, to be quite frank, you will have no hand in.
It is done by those up above, and it merely refers to,
The larger movements over which we have no control.
But tactics are also important, together or single.
You must never forget that, suddenly, in an engagement,
You may find yourself alone.

…and I’ll tell you this: in the American military, we are not allowed to refuse illegal orders (say, to blow up a school bus)–we are required to refuse illegal orders.  Think about that if you would like to understand how outraged my fellow veterans and myself were by Trump’s comment, in response to an interviewer’s question about how he could possibly support Putin, a killer: There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers.  You think our country’s so innocent?”  Fuck you: the American military is not the moral equivalent of the Russian military.

The graphic showing the distribution of languages in ISIS comes from the temporalflight.tumblr.com blog.

 

 

 

 

 

The big issues in the news in the US at the moment:

• The shame of the Trump administration’s treatment of migrant children from Central America
• Why reporters don’t use the word “lie” to describe the things that come frequently out of the mouth of the current president of our country

Depressing.  So depressing that the New York Times, the best-known newspaper in the United States and one of the most well-known newspapers in the world, has taken to publishing (to take to +present participle explained in the English notes below) a page of good news on Sundays.

I took a look at said good news this morning, and was underwhelmed–there’s just nothing there to remotely match the tragedy that I see unfolding around me here in the United States.  But, that doesn’t mean that I can’t find things to feel grateful for.  Other than my cat, the fact that my kid isn’t in a refugee camp in Syria, and the fact that I will have food available to eat for breakfast today (lots of people won’t), what’s making me happy this morning is this vocabulary of mining terminology in Inuktitut.

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Inuktitut is an Inuit language spoken by a bit under 40,000 people in the north of Canada.  It is a polysynthetic language, meaning that words have many parts, to the point that it’s not clear whether you would want to say that they actually have words, versus sentences.  Here’s an Inuktitut word/sentence (from Wikipedia, citing an article on developing a screening tool for Inuktitut-language speech pathologists):

• ᖃᖓᑕᓲᒃᑯᕕᒻᒨᕆᐊᖃᓛᖅᑐᖓ (in Inuktitut orthography)
• qangatasuukkuvimmuuriaqalaaqtunga (transliteration)
• “I’ll have to go to the airport” (English translation)

Illuminating points about Inuktitut: the language has three vowels–in the International Phonetic Alphabet, [i], [u], and [a].  Spoken languages have a minimum of three vowels (yes, my fellow linguists, I am leaving out one controversial case here–don’t hate on me), and if a language only has three vowels, they are [i], [u], and [a].  (Languages with four vowels add [e] or [o].  Languages with five vowels have [i], [u], [a], [e], or [o].)

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How do you come up with new terminology for a language that doesn’t have it?  A workshop brought together a group consisting of:

• Tribal elders
• Inuktitut language specialists
• A mining expert

…who spent three days hashing it all out.

So, what does mining terminology look like in Inuktitut?  Here are some examples from the glossary, maintained by the Department of Indigenous and Northern affairs:

Latitude
imaginary lines that cross the surface of the Earth parallel to the equator used to determine location with longitude
(ᓄᓇᙳᐊᕐᒥ ᓴᓂᒧᐊᖓᓂᖓ)

Mineralization
the process by which a mineral is introduced into a rock, resulting in a valuable or potentially valuable deposit
(ᐅᔭᕋᖕᓂᐊᒐᒃᓴᕈᕐᓂᑯ)

Placer
a deposit of sand or gravel that contains particles of gold, gemstones, or other heavy minerals of value
(ᐃᒪᕐᒧᑦ ᓴᖅᑭᑕᐅᓂᑯ)

Stratum
a layer or bed of rock
(ᐃᑭᐊᕇᑦ)

…and that’s what’s making me happy today.  Does seeking happiness in les bizarreries of human linguistic, social, and technological behavior that mean that I will ignore my citizenly duty to stay on top of the daily crimes of the crooks that are currently running my country?  No.  Does it mean that I actively and daily seek things to be grateful for?  Yes–and I recommend that you try it.  Can’t hurt, right?

Source of the picture at the top of the page: http://kiggavik.ca/tag/community-engagement/

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English notes

to take to + present participle: to start a routine practice of doing something.  Examples:

My cat, mainly black, took to lying outside livingroom door. In the dark. How I didn’t break my neck, or actually stand on him, beats me! He stopped after I accidentally… yes it was…booted him on the head. Now lying on my legs. Stopping circulation. My boy!

— Irene Danks (@irene_danks) February 4, 2018

I always felt Sean Spicer was, at least, conflicted about it. Rumor was he took to stress eating. SHS actually seems to relish her role disseminating the President’s lies. No hiding in the bushes for her!

— WM Bartle (@WM_Bartle) January 17, 2018

I see Sarah Sanders has taken to lying outside of her posted office hours. Ma’am. You lie every day. And you just told Chris Cuomo that you like your job. Which means you ENJOY lying to the American people. I have reserved several seats for you. 👎🏾🤷🏾‍♀️😒

— Miss Mox (@hotblackbitter) June 7, 2018

How I used it in the post: The New York Times has taken to publishing a page of good news on Sundays.

to take to + noun or present particple: to become good at some activity, especially quickly. You can often differentiate this from the previous usage by the presence of an analogy along with it: like a…

It’s begiining to look like all Russian roads end at kushner, who took to lying like a true trump!

— Ruby Dragonfly (@ruby_dragonfly) July 16, 2017

I created the Trump admin on the foundation of lies. I pride myself in how well they took to lying. This guy was a freakin embarrassment.

— SaTaN (@theREELSaTaN) September 19, 2017

to take to can also be used with a person as its object, or with a location, either physical (he took to the podium) or metaphorical (he took to Twitter to…) The meanings are different here–I’m too lazy to find a bunch of examples on this Sunday morning…

Sean Spicer lied every day he took to the podium.. He didn’t say he didn’ lie, he said, he doesn’t think he ever lied.

— Easy48 (@hankboo) September 21, 2017

It’s even more hypocritical that Sanders stood at her podium and defended businesses that refuse to serve gay people, and then took to Twitter to lament the injustice of being refused service at a restaurant because the owner cited their own moral convictions.

— Sky Palma (@DeadStateTweets) June 24, 2018

underwhelmed: not at all impressed. Note that underwhelmed is not the opposite of overwhelmed. (Lesson: do not look for “logic” in language.) Some examples:

Being hurt by someone’s inaction is the worst. Or underwhelmed by an action. Like you did something but I wanted more

— YourAssignedFBIAgent (@But_I_dnt_care) June 24, 2018

Amsterdam, Netherlands 🇳🇱

Paid the Dutch a visit and was really underwhelmed by The Red Light District: live sex show and all. Ate tons of Stroopwaffels like I am not already an Oompa Loompa. Survived one too many bicycle collisions: those things are a hazard! pic.twitter.com/ave3zGR7Y6

— Xolisa Mapatwana (@XolisaM_) June 24, 2018

Haha, there’s a scene in the film 10 Things I Hate About You:
“So, you can be overwhelmed, and you can be underwhelmed…but can you ever just be whelmed?
“Uh, I think you can in Europe?”

— Charlotte & David | No Fixed Home (@NoFixedHome) June 24, 2018

(Love this one!)

How I used it in the post: I took a look at said good news this morning, and was underwhelmed–there’s just nothing there to remotely match the tragedy that I see unfolding around me here in the United States.