iBeth

A new taste sensation

Perhaps I was especially hungry when I misread this postcard* as advertising "EDIBLE" Bible lessons.

* not from my church

Confusing Lawn Care Ad

This confusing slogan was left on our doorknob the other day: "We Take Care of Your Lawn. Not Your Neighbor!"  Huh?  The flyer arrived shortly after one of our  neighbors sold his lawn care business, but we don't think these expensive-looking glossy door-hangers were printed just for our block.

My best guess is that the company means to imply its service will make our lawn look so good, our neighbors will be jealous. 

I don't really need any more negative vibes coming from my neighbors, thank you. 

A New Curse Word, Darn It!

The first time, I thought nothing of it, but I've heard this from several sources now: "Darn" has become a curse word. ?????  I always thought of "darn it" as a rather quaint substitute for "damn it."  In fact, the American Heritage Dictionary backs me up on this.   But.

One day:

I uttered "darn it" around a group of preschoolers, only to be greeted with a profound hush that was both shocked and delighted. 

"You said a bad word!" one child whispered. 

"No I didn't," I said.   "Darn isn't a bad word."

The kids looked crestfallen.  "Oh."

Another day:

A friend confessed that her daughter is picking up her bad language.  "She says darn it all the time, even though I keep telling her not to use bad words."

"But darn isn't a bad word," I said, puzzled.

My friend looked at me.  "It sounds terrible to hear those words coming out of the mouth of a four-year-old," she said.

I am beginning to feel very uncouth. 

Is there a linguistic term for the phenomenon through which an acceptable substitute for a taboo word becomes taboo itself?  And what words are left that our kids can say?  Are they reduced to phooey and rats? 
I fear that my own children will soon be saying much more colorful words than even darn it, but they will have learned those words from watching tv at a friend's house, because we never say any bad words around here.

Great Writer, Rotten Speller

This article from the Washington Post is as hilarious as it is informative.  It's written by Steve Hendrix, a successful reporter who just can't spell:

Iteneriary is one of the dozens of words that bring me to a complete standstill. I can be typing along at a brisk pace when my brain feeds a word like itenirary down to my flying fingers, and they freeze over the keyboard like mummified buzzard claws.

Itinerary. I-T . . . E? . . . I? Pretty sure it's I. N is easy. Another E? or is it A? . . . R . . . Two Rs? A? A-R-Y. Itinerrary.

I once spell-checked a 2,000-word article I had written for the Post's Travel section and found I had spelled itinerary four ways, none of them correctly. It was a pitiful tally, made worse by the fact that it blinked at me in the middle of a newsroom filled with some of the best writers -- and spellers -- in the country. I could hear them all around me, blithely tapping out the 100,000-plus words that go into the paper every morning, most spelled correctly on the first go. People who write for big-city newspapers are supposed to be able to spell. The island of misfit toys, this is not.

 

I often remind students that terrible spellers are clustered in the highest and lowest ends of the IQ spectrum, so if they can't spell they're probably geniuses!  (But sadly, I don't have a good source for that factoid--heard it from a grad school guest speaker and have been meaning to look it up ever since.  That, and the Ben Franklin story.*)

Anyway, it's well worth reading.  And the html version has with a hilarious picture. (via Bookslut)

* Supposedly, the reason the U.S. puts commas and periods inside the quotes is that Ben Franklin did so.  And Franklin did so because he was a printer who noticed that the commas and periods were on half-sized pieces of type that tended to fall out.  Putting them inside the quote type pieces (slugs?) helped to hold them in place.  Even if this story is apocryphal, it helps students remember the U.S. rule for punctuation with quotes.   And even if the "high IQs are good spellers" factoid is apocryphal, it helps students remember not to condemn poor spellers as lazy or stupid.

Plural Amelia

Amelia is really getting into plural nouns.  She has concluded that every plural requires an extra syllable, so she tells us about her "jamases" (pajamas) and "eyeses" (eyes). 

Other adorable Amelia-isms:

• nose pickle = nose pill (children's decongestant pill)
• toy sauce = soy sauce
• tease = please

Yesterday at a restaurant, she was thrilled to see "Sponge Bop"; she particularly remarked on his "BIG NOSE!  BIiIiG  NOoOoOoOoOoOoOose!"  And still, more than a month after Christmas, she is utterly captivated by "Noman on tv!" (a dvd of Raymond  Briggs' The Snowman). 

Joyous Grammar Description

I truly enjoyed the joyous discussion of the teaching of writing from this article by Philip Pullman in The Guardian:

The most valuable attitude we can help children adopt - the one that, among other things, helps them to write and read with most fluency and effectiveness and enjoyment - I can best characterise by the word playful.

 

Pluralizing New Nouns

Here's another great tidbit for my classes--Engadget tracked down the correct plural of the iPod Shuffle:

US [Engadget]: Thanks for calling us back. We have a really important question for you. How do you pluralize “iPod shuffle?”

APPLE: Like in a sentence?

US: Yeah, like would you say “iPod shuffles” or “iPods shuffle?”

APPLE: Huh. “iPod shuffles.” It’s “iPod shuffles.”

US: Are you sure? Would you mind double-checking, because people do say “attorneys general” and not “attorney generals.” We don’t want to offend William Safire and write the wrong thing.

APPLE: Let me ask someone here. [Puts us on hold for a minute.] Yeah, it’s “iPod shuffles.”

US: Thanks!

I think the question arose because iPod has been the headword of the noun phrase, e.g. an iPod, my new iPod, the iPod Mini (where Mini is the postnoun modifier*).  Normally we would add the -s or -es to the headword to make the noun phrase plural.  But in this case, the headword is apparently Shuffle.  I'll have to remember this example when we discuss nominals and morphemes.

Update:  A quick check of Google suggests that iPod is actually the prenoun modifier in iPod Mini.  A search for "iPod Minis" yielded 642,000 hits; a search with "my Mini" and "iPod" yielded 35,000 hits.  A search for "iPods Mini" returned 6,630 hits, and at least the first few screens worth all had punctuation or tab between the words, e.g., "iPod+Mini" or "iPods: Mini."  So technically, this question should have arisen with the Mini (why isn't it iPods Mini like Attorneys General?)  I wonder if there's something about the word "shuffle" that makes it seem less noun-like?  Or is it the fact that we have so many other Minis, e.g., the Mini Cooper, the Mac Mini?

Linguists Love WWW

Language Log and Language Hat both mention this fascinating Economist article, "Corpus Colossal," about using the www as a corpus for linguistic research.  I've been using it the same way in my grammar classes (e.g., using web browsers to search for examples of passive voice or sentence modifiers and then analyzing the surrounding texts to determine in which genres these structures are most appropriate).  I'll have to point my students to this article.  (I really need to get busy organizing my spurl so I can feed stuff like this more easily.)

Amelia Do & Emmy Have Sawn

Amelia is starting to say "do" but only in the sentence "do like it."  I guess I'm not the only one who has been confused by her practice of saying "Like it!" to mean both "do like it" and "don't like it"(the negation communicated via nonverbal means).. We heard another personal pronoun today, too: "I caught it [the ball]!"

Emma made a rare verb form error the other day.  "I have never sawn it," she explained about something she'd never seen.  She is definitely becoming aware of weak vs. strong verb forms.

Amelia Uses Negative + Do

Amelia has had the word "No!" down pat for awhile, now, but she has relied on nonverbal strategies to communicate other negative statements.  For example, when she doesn't like some kind of food, she normally exclaims, "LIKE IT!" with a head shake to indicate that she doesn't like it.  It reminds me of my sign language classes--that sort of negation was always surprisingly easy for me to miss.

Well, today Amelia made a great leap forward.  "LIKE IT!" she said of my dad's holiday stollen*, and as usual, I misunderstood.  "You like it?"

"DON'T like it," she amended, as she handed the piece of stollen to me.  (I promptly ate it--more for me! Yum!)

Lately, she has learned to use pitch as well as volume for emphasis.  She sounds like a little siren, e.g., "Snowman!**  SNOWMAN!  Sno-o-o-o-o-o-ma-a-a-a-a-an!"  Imagine her voice wobbling up and down in pitch on the last, like a fire engine.  I'm not sure where she picked that up.

* That link isn't the same as my dad's recipe, but you get the idea.

**The Snowman is Amelia's current favorite video.