Word play

I am taking a University for Seniors at UMD called “Words Just Want to Have Fun”.

The instructor passed out cards with a word or a phrase.  We were supposed to make a poem using that word.  Mine was “buffalo” and I thought of a haiku and a pair of rhymes.

Buffalo, the town,
Gets lots and lots of deep snow.
It’s the lake effect.

Where the buffalo roam
Is the subject of a poem.
But there are no buffalo on the range
And the bison are penned to cook on your range.

We were also supposed to work in pairs on a cryptogram.  It is from the Oct-Dec. SPELL/Binder.  No pair finished it in class.  I kept making copying errors, putting the letter of the clue in the grid rather than the letter in the clue.  I also had to look three clues, one online (author of “The Razor’s Edge”,  one in the dictionary that began with “syn”, and one in “Hamlet” about what the ghost had to say about Gertrude.

This last was misleading because the clue included “Hamlet’s ghost”, not the ghost in “Hamlet”.

Like you haiku?

Haiku an art form
I cannot think how to do.
Once I start oh wow.

Haiku you can do.
Just forget correct grammar.
And write what you think.

In the dark of night
I wrote haiku left and right.
Gone with morning mist.

Impatient patient
Waiting, waiting, and waiting.
Doc will see you now!

I had these haiku (5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables) in my notes for a few months.  It seems it was only that day that haiku just kept popping out of my head.  I really haven't thought of any since.

It could be a good thing to do when you can't think of anything else to do.

It is a good thing
To think difficult deep thoughts,
Results could come quickly.

Count so carefully,
Two of the haiku I wrote
Had more syllables.

Now it is bedtime,
But my brain is now working
Overtime darn it!

How do you pronounce fir, fur, and for?

You think the first two rhyme and the third rhymes with a number, then listen to several speakers.  Just as "to" has morphed into "tuh", "for" has morphed into "fer", rhyming with the first two words.  See "How do you pronounce two, too, and to?"

I was reminded of this when my son, a manager in a large company, recently said "fer" for "for" in casual conversation.

I have begun saying that there is no "correct" language, only that which people use.  We constantly see words or expressions that were once "unacceptable" have become commonplace.  When I was in grade school, teachers reminded us that "kid" was a baby goat, not a young person.  Now teachers talk about their students as their kids.

We don't need a tower of Babel to create different languages.  We do it all by ourselves, both in the short term as above but in the long term such as the various Romance languages or the divergence (and melding) of American and British English.

Your teachers overgeneralized

Remember the grammar rule, i before e except after c.  That's weird, what about their, heir, weir, either, neither, …  That rule has become foreign to me.

1968 Letter from Europe

My mother-in-law kept many of our letters from Europe in a scrapbook.  After she died three years ago, my wife kept the scrapbooks.  This week she has been rereading our old letters.  She pointed out to me one I wrote from Basel 29/30 October 1968.

I was in Basel, Switzerland to prepare a demo for a potential Univac customer.  Univac didn't have one of its own computers in Europe yet, and so we borrowed or bought time on customer computers.  For this demo I was working with an 1108 at Sandoz in Basel.  Sandoz is now called Novartis.

I don't remember much of the trip except I was introduced to raclettes, cheese melted on a board in front of a fire.  The German I was working with took me to a restaurant near the bahnhof that specialized in raclettes.  I've had and have made raclettes since then, but none have compared to those at that Swiss restaurant.

And I don't remember if we made the sale for which we did the demo.


Letter to my in-laws, Jean and Fred Smith, 29/30 October 1968

Dear Folks,

I am back in Basel on a four week assignment and back to learning German, but tomorrow or Thursday I go back to Rome for the rest of the year, I hope.  Not quite, we hope to take a two week ski vacation at Christmas time, but in Switzerland.  I tried calling three hotels in Davos yesterday, and found out you have to make your reservations in the spring or in January when you leave, so we will probably spend this year in Italy.

All this travel is not as exciting as it may seem.  As I generally work nights and have to see people during the day it often becomes an eat-sleep-work cycle.  Right now I am writing this while waiting to get on the machine [a Univac 1108 computer].  Hah, just as I finished the last sentence, the machine became free.  Now I am baby-sitting the machine at the console.

The most interesting and frustrating experience of being in Europe is the language problem.  My minimal French, German and Italian gets me throughout quite a variety of situations, but general conversation is a rare and difficult thing.  The missing ingredients are vocabulary and listening ability.  I really think that in the U. S. not enough emphasis is put on foreign language ability and they are are treated as an academic subject.  Throughout most of the world to much importance is given to grammar and not enough to vocabulary.  I always cringe when a grammar author boasts that he only introduces 20 words per lesson.  I have found, especially in Italian, that one can use a grammarian's nightmare of a sentence but still convey the thought if one has sufficient words.  Conversely with a bit of vocabulary and little grammar one can at least get the sense of newspaper stories.  To me the best method would be to have classes using conversation and reading newspapers and magazines.  Tests would be on the things read just as they might be in English lit or History.  (Most Europeans who graduate from high school can speak 2 foreign languages, of course not all finish, but still.)

Sincerely,
Mel

Plural humor

I've long mused that the only languages that I know that add an 's' to indicate a plural noun are English, French, and Spanish. Other languages that I've encountered use other final sounds or inflection. Inflection is the changing of a vowel sound, like one alumnus or many alumni.

English however uses inflection also. Is this a holdover from its Germanic origin?

For example, we have goose and geese, mouse and mice. Does this last mean that the plural of spouse is spice? When I mentioned this to my wife, I added I really think the plural of spouse is trouble.

The Web is a library that never closes...

... and it is so easy to get lost in it. Just like in a physical library, you look up one thing and you find at least three more of interest. Since it never closes and most likely you are already home, you just keep looking up one thing after another, winding up far from where one started.

And serendipity is more prevalent on the Web because there are far more items that cross your gaze. Here are some examples that I might not have seen in the daily papers.

"Monkeys recognize "bad grammar", BBC News, 2009-07-08

"Whales Watching Us", Charles Siebert, New York Times Magazine, 2009-07-08

"Dozens of Dazed, Huge Squid Wash Up on San Diego Beach after Earthquake", Huffington Post, 2009-07-13

Wouldn't you think the Washington Post would know infinitely better?

Especially the Science editor!

In an article about the Hubble Space Telescope, they write "but there are an almost infinite number of other possibilities." ("What Do You Want to See", 2009-02-02)

This is as bad as the advertiser who touts that a product has an endless number of uses.

Any scientist should know that you can never reach "almost infinity". Take any really, really large number, double it. You still are not close to infinity. Square it, you still are not close to infinity. Raise it to a power of itself. You still are not close to infinity.

Now bad or incorrect word usage, that is almost endless!

I lately lost a preposition

I have tried to remember this little poem for quite some time. Today I did a search for it and found several copies.

I lately lost a preposition

It hid, I thought, beneath my chair

And angrily I cried: perdition

up from out in under there!

Correctness is my vademecum

Straggling phrases I abhor

Still I wonder what should it come

Up from out in under for?

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/laszlo_gabris/FUNPOEM1.htm and others.

See also Language Log_ Churchill vs. editorial nonsense.

Gender-neutral language?

Many want to use language that is wholly gender-neutral but I think many attempts will be clumsy, even one many of us choose without thinking.

Chairor or chairperson instead of chairman or chair comes to mind. Of course, is a person something to sit in? Usage does make chair more acceptable than the first two choices; "the chair recognizes" is standard formal meeting usage.

Mailperson or fireperson thankfully have fallen by the wayside in favor of mail carrier or fire fighter.

The Unitarian-Universalists, who believe in the free and responsible search for truth have denied the truth of Walt Whitman's wishes. He did not want one word of his poems changed. But the UU hymnal "Singing the Living Tradition", in the name of gender-neutrality, has changed his "the men who govern you" to "those who govern you". My gosh, how can you take out a syllable from a poem?

One could use "one" as the pronoun for a person in general, but one finds that the use of "one" as a pronoun a bit outdated or clumsy.

"He or she", "him or her", "his or hers" have had some popularity for talking or writing about a person in general, but I find them clumsy also.

Popular usage has found the solution, but strict grammarians don't like it. "Someone left their wallet on the store counter" makes perfect sense to most people, but strict grammarians would complain about lack of agreement in number between the main subject and the pronoun referencing it. However, any language that follows the same rules for all time is a dead language. A living language, especially in a democracy, follows the rules made by today's speakers, not speakers of two hundred years ago.

Sure, many of us will rave and rant about usages we don't like. Like, they feel uncomfortable to our ear, you know. My teachers spoke against using "kid" for "child", but today's teachers easily use "kids" to refer to their students.

For a fun reference on language, read "The Power of Babel" by John McWorter. He gives many examples and explanations on how languages change.