Words I Hate For No Particular Reason

Munch. Why do we need it? We have perfectly good words that indicate eating. Munch sounds like a combination of something an animal would do and something an animal would eat. I suppose that’s somewhat silly, considering the fact that we humans are, in fact, animals, and it does, in fact, describe what an animal does when it eats. However, it feels to me like it indicates some kind of mindless, gratuitous eating but without even enjoying it. What the hell is the point of that? If you are the kind of person who just eats because you have to, then you’re not eating gratuitously, so there’s no need to “munch.” And if you are eating mindlessly, shouldn’t you be doing it because you are enjoying it? Then it would be ‘snacking’ or ‘indulging’ or hell, even ‘enjoying’! But no munching, please. Yes yes, there are those who might say that someone could very well be enjoying whatever it is they are ‘munching’ on (it even irks me to have to use that word when complaining about it!) but you just won’t convince me that it’s any different than a slack-eyed cow standing around chewing her cud all day long, which just seems gross to me. Finally, that awful word also, in my admittedly biased mind, means that you can hear the action of chewing, and that folks, is just plain disgusting.

Split Book Personality

I seem to hold somewhat contradictory opinions about books. I hold them in such reverence and yet, I love when they look used and worn. (But not dog-eared. I decided long ago that bookmarks were the way to go. ) I hate the way the spines on paperbacks get cracked and lined after reading, but I love that my Turkish dictionary has a dark smudge on the side of the pages from thumbing through it so much. I love the clean, crisp smell of a brand new hardcover, the freshness of the new print. However, I also love an old musty bookstore, filled with books that have been passed from hand to hand and used by unknown readers before me. I absolutely hate when a book is written in, and yet I find it hard not to annotate the books that I use for teaching (though granted, I have switched to sticky notes for annotation).

I love libraries but I hate the sterile atmosphere that they can have. Libraries are so careful to preserve, which is good, but at some point you can cross a line between preservation and mummification, especially when books are kept behind glass doors, presumably to keep them away from the great unwashed. When do we get to use these books? Where can we live with them, drink coffee with them, talk and laugh over them while they sit open on the table? This brings me, of course, to bookstores. I often find myself in the bookstore café. Here I can drink and eat, listen to music, people-watch, write or read, and when I lift my eyes up, I can see shelves upon shelves of books. They are comforting and they keep me company. I could be utterly alone in a bookstore and not feel alone. I would be surrounded with the ghosts from all of the books around me. Books hold stories and ideas and whole worlds – how can’t they be alive? As much as I love to wander amongst the books in the library stacks, it seems an injustice to keep them sequestered in sterile, quiet, lifeless vaults. I can understand how one may want to revere the books and treat them delicately so as not to ruin them, but I don’t waste them by being too afraid to have them out in the open, near voices and coffee and breadcrumbs.

Button Pushers

“Where’s it at?”
“I could care less.”
“Less people.”

The first two sentences are or contain linguistic items that drive people crazy. I’ve heard any number of people complain about them. They are equal-opportunity annoyances. The third phrase is one that only a few people seem to be bothered by anymore, and I’ve already addressed why in this very sentence. We’ll get to that.

The at in the first phrase is actually a preposition that lends the sentence more precision. It’s not correct grammar in the traditional sense, but it does serve a purpose, albeit a redundant one. “At” is used to denote a specific location in time or space. No one cringes when “at” is used in a sentence. “She’s at home/school/the mall/a friend’s house.” “The party is at 10:00” The preposition serves to locate the item in time or space. Why is it cringe-worthy in a question? Is it because of the drilling we’ve all gotten about not ending a sentence in a preposition? Hasn’t that already been debunked? We have come to view the question ending in “at” as uneducated and that is what we are railing against. See? I just ended that sentence with a preposition, for just as Churchill, whether he said it or not, there are some things up with which I will not put.

There has already been much discussion on “I could care less” and about how it is infuriatingly ungrammatical or illogical. If we are looking at syntax only, of course it does not mean the same thing as its respected counterpart, “I couldn’t care less.” However, looking at syntax alone isn’t enough, as Chomsky proved in his famous example of syntax sans semantics: Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. Language isn’t used in a vacuum. Language is used in context, during life. It is an imperfect system used by imperfect users, which means it is subject to our whims, our creativity, and our ignorance. Would it bother you less if you heard someone say “As if I could care less!” along with appropriate tone and gestures to convey sarcasm? No? Perhaps it is the omission of the obvious cues that makes us think that the person is simply ignorant of the “correct” phrase, and this bothers us.

The third phrase represents a valid linguistic distinction that is still valuable and recognized, but for some reason, the grammatical difference between less/fewer is going away. Only a few people realize these days that “people” is a countable noun and if we want to say that the number of people who understand that has decreased, we would say fewer people understand why it’s wrong to say less people.

Once again, this leads me to the conclusion that it is not the phrase itself that offends, but the ignorance behind it. Each phrase implies ignorance of something to each person. For me, the first two don’t offend because it seems to me that they are learned as entire chunks, a la Michael Lewis, and therefore are simply mis-assigned a meaning. The third is a perfectly valid and current generative rule of English grammar that is being ignored or improperly learned. That’s why it bothers me.

So, doesn’t this tell me as much about myself as it may about the person uttering the ungrammatical statement? Our language reveals much about us, both intentionally and unintentionally, and not just what we say, but what we hear and how we hear it.

The Lazy Days of Summer

I've got some pieces in the works, but my entire month has been utterly consumed by my summer classes, so until I can finish them, here's a quick overview of what's been consuming me. I'm teaching two sections of Composition and Literature 2. I had the students buy How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster as their "textbook." It's a really accessible introduction to concepts and techniques of literary analysis. I love not using a traditional textbook, but it certainly does take more work. Here's the reading list we've covered:

1. "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" by Joyce Carol Oates
2. "The Garden Party" by Katherine Mansfield
3. "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" by Ernest Hemingway
4. "Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances" by Walt Whitman
5. "After Apple Picking" by Robert Frost
6. "The Power of Myth" - video interview of Joseph Campbell by Bill Moyers
7. "Talking New York" and "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" by Bob Dylan
8. "The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin
9. Anthem by Ayn Rand
10. The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
11. Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare (okay, we actually watched the Kenneth Brannagh film adaptation)

(Speaking of Much Ado, I will be going to see a production of that in August, which is something I'm very much looking forward to. The Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival always puts on such a wonderful show.)

The students have also chosen the following stories for their upcoming group presentations:

1. "All Summer in a Day" by Ray Bradbury
2. "The Most Dangerous Game" by Richard Connell
3. "Salvation" by Langston Hughes
4. "The Chaser" by John Collier
5. "Hunters in the Snow" by Tobias Wolff
6. 3 Shakespeare soliloquies (from Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Hamlet)
7. "The Lady or the Tiger?" by Frank Stockton
8. "Lament" by Edna St. Vincent Millay
9. "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" by J.D. Salinger
10. "Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allen Poe
11. "Phenomenal Woman" by Maya Angelou
12. "Eveline" by James Joyce

Not too shabby. We've been following what I like to call a "Learn, Practice, Teach" philosophy of gaining knowledge. I started out teaching them certain concepts of literary analysis, they they practiced with essays (so many papers to grade - what was I thinking???), and now they will teach their story to the class this coming week. I'm really pleased with the response I've been getting from the students so far. Of course, I'm still being chewed up with papers to grade and some lessons to plan, but after next week, when I've been spit back out, I'll have time to create a more thoughtful evaluation of the work we've done.

For now, here's an activity I like to do on the first day of my literature classes. It's something that the students are generally quite wary of at first, but then they find themselves absorbed in the challenge and I've been told it was one of their favorite activities. First, I ask each student to give me their favorite word, or at least a word that they really like. They go up on the board. Then, in groups, the students must then write a poem using the words. There are only two basic rules:

1. Use only the words on the board. Do not use any word that is not on the board.
2. Words can be repeated or modified for part of speech.

Usually at this point, students beg me for permission to use function words. "Please, can't we PLEASE have 'the'?? Or at least 'and'??" After they get over the shock of being forced to understand relationships between words and creating meaning without the use of grammatical function words, they start to get excited about how imaginative they can actually be by creating associations and images using only content words.

Here's a list of words from one of the classes this summer:

power, pride, what, ridiculous, dying, bent, change, amazing, rambunctious, turn, exuberance, quiet, shenanigans, excessive, money, exclamation, jealousy, respect, entertain, friendship, awesome, and (yes, someone said that before they had any idea of what they were going to be asked to do.)

I may have missed a few words, but that's most of them.

Ready to write a poem? Knock yourselves out!

My kind of people, fighting the good fight.

http://www.rd.com/your-america-inspiring-people-and-stories/righting-wrong-writing/article118948.html

I want...

...this t-shirt.

Proud Mama

I’ve got tredecaplets! Yes, I have 13 new babies. I was so excited to bring them home. Combined, they weigh 86 pounds, measure in at nearly 3 feet long, and contain in the neighborhood of 10,000 pages, and over 400,000 words. No, I didn’t count them all myself.

Yes, I’m the proud new mother of a complete set of the 1933 first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Gomer Pyle contemplates his new siblings.

It took me three trips to get them settled in their new home in my office, where they seem to be quite happy. The one downside is that I coughed for a full 15 minutes as years of dust got unsettled in the move. It didn’t stop me from perusing, however, to see the gems that await me beneath the dust. Here’s a sample:

Banter:
[Of unknown etymology: it is doubtful whether the vb. or sb. was the earlier; existing evidence is in favour of the vb. The sb. was treated as slang in 1688: Swift, in the Apology to his Tale of a Tub (1710), says that it 'was first borrowed from the bullies in White Friars, then fell among the footmen, and at last retired to the pedants'; in Tatler No.230, he classes it with bamboozle, country put, and kidney, as a word "invented by some pretty Fellows' and 'now struggling for the Vogue." But the vb. was then nearly 40 years old.]

And that is all before the definition is given. How can you not love it?

But…

…dusty.

It is, after all, a 76-year-old dictionary. What use is it other than giving temporary respiratory distress? It doesn’t have any of the new words coined in the last three-quarters of a century, and there have been a lot of words added to our language in that period of time! So if I can’t look up emoticon, napalm, yuppie, post-traumatic stress syndrome, AIDS, newbie, or gigabyte then what good is the dictionary?

Interestingly enough, I had the thought that half-assed might be in there, given that it supposedly entered the language in 1932, even though it feels much newer than that. And…:

†Half-ass. Obs. [tr. Gr. ήμιονος] A mule. 1587. “A Halfeasse of Persia call come and make vs his thralles.”

Not exactly the way we use the adjective now, but it could shed further light on the explanation of “perhaps a humorous mispronunciation of haphazard,” and for that reason, aside from the sheer geeky deliciousness of it, the OED is invaluable. Every word has a history, just as each of us has a background, a set of memories, a past that led us to our present selves. We have used these words, in some cases for hundreds of years, to express our changing ideas, values, identities, fears and desires. The words we choose reveal something about ourselves, sometimes even unintentionally. Studying the vocabulary of English up until 1933, then, is like undertaking a social and psychological study of the people who spoke those words. And don’t just believe me. I’m not the only one who loves this dictionary.

Of course, the entire OED is now available online, so if I am looking for up-to-date information about our latest version of English – and ourselves – it is easily available. It is certainly important to understand how people are using the language, since this dictates language change whether we like it or not. I may hate texting abbreviations in writing, or certain annoying shortcuts in spoken language (since when do we order an appy before dinner?) and I may cringe every time I hear someone say “irregardless” or “less things,” but there is very little I can do about it on a large scale. There needs to be standards, of course, but the study of language change and evolution is the study of what people actually say and use in their daily lives, not necessarily of what they should be saying.

In fact, the very reason for the OED was to capture the essence of the language, not just its current state at the time, but also in centuries leading up to that point. To quote the Preface of my edition, “[t]he aim of this Dictionary is to present in alphabetical series the words that have formed the English vocabulary from the time from the earliest records down to the present day, with all the relevant facts concerning their form, sense-history, pronunciation, and etymology. It embraces not only the standard language of literature and conversation, whether current at the moment, or obsolete, or archaic, but also the main technical vocabulary, and a large measure of dialectal usage and slang.”

And according to the shiny new internet version, found here:

“The ambitious goals which the Philological Society set out in 1857 seem modest in comparison with the phenomenal achievement which their initiative set in motion. The Oxford English Dictionary is a living document that has been growing and changing for 140 years. Far more than a convenient place to look up words and their origins, the Oxford English Dictionary is an irreplaceable part of English culture. It not only provides an important record of the evolution of our language, but also documents the continuing development of our society. It is certain to continue in this role as we enter the new century.”

Overachieve much?

It is an astounding document and I’m still a little stunned at how it so easily landed in my lap. Or more accurately, the trunk of my car. I’m sure I will be referring to it regularly here and to anyone who can put up with me as I wax poetic about the things I learn inside those dusty covers.