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This week on A Way with Words we start a brand-new season! Find out what a motorcyclist wears to keep from getting sunburned and why your little finger is called a pinkie. Plus, a recap of 2007—in limericks!
Read the original blog post and listen to this episode.
It's a brand-new season here on A Way with Words! To celebrate, Martha and Grant are noodling with anagrams—including the one in the title of this episode. Also:
A New York City schoolteacher asks, "Why do we call our little finger a pinkie?" and relates his invented etymology.
Another caller snickers over a newscaster's attempt to pronounce the word homage. Which of the six ways is best?
A Hoosier who's been hanging out on motorcycle discussion boards is curious about the origin of the term do-rag. Or is it dew-rag?
"Why is an undesirable task called a g-job?" asks a crew member on the set of the Fox Television series 24.
Martha shares a trick for remembering the answer to that perennial question: "Does a comma go inside or outside of quotation marks?"
The hosts weigh in on whether the expression "very fun" is grammatically correct.
What the heck is a podsnicker, anyway?
Puzzle-man Greg Pliska joins us for a recap of 2007—in limericks!
Is your DVD player always flashing "12:00"? A caller wonders if there's a word for a society ruled by children, something along the lines of patriarchy and matriarchy.
Also join us for another slang quiz, in which DeeDee picks "slon doon" as her favorite slang word. You can see what she's talking about in the picture below, taken by Kiwi world travelers Carol and Lawrie Chandler in Gansu Province, China.
Btw, re that first call about why our little fingers are called "pinkies": We received an email from Carey Carpenter, a professor at Palomar College, who's writing what sounds like a very cool book on how different body parts got named. Lots of fun stuff (and great illustrations!) at his blog, Anatomy Word of the Day.
greyaenigma said:
Also, I feel compelled to link to this post on the old forum.
Link away, greyaenigma. Always happy to Award Showy Wit!
Penny said:
A 12-year old had given a puzzle–what 4-letter common male name can change the first letter to the next letter of the alphabet and create another 4-letter common male name.
My husband and I thought it was Mick and Nick.
Did anyone else come up with something else?
Penny, thanks for stopping by. We received several emails about this over the weekend, but I think it must have been from some other show. Does anyone know?
And given the parameters you describe, I suspect you're right. I mean, my first instinct was Brad and Crad. I like your answer better!
I have to object to your answer to the question about periods and quotes. The story here is not so simple as you describe. In fact the "which looks prettier" is precisely the right answer but how you get from that to the various prescribed answers is a far more complex story than you implied. The history here is an interesting story about how technology has changed the way we think about writing and language.
Before technology intervened the question would never have arisen. When writing out a quotation in handwriting you would just naturally place the period the same distance as normal from the text and the quotation marks the same distance as normal from the text. Since one lies so much higher than the other there's no conflict at all.
Essentially this was a simple case of what oother languages have in quite elaborate forms of characters which are placed above or below or in various other positions relative to each other.
When the printing press was invented and typography became more stylized typographers went to quite a lot of trouble to be able to arrange characters how it was judged they looked prettiest. This included being able to overlap character pairs like VA (which probably has an unsightly river of white space running between them on your screen, for example).
It was with the invention of the typewriter that suddenly we started having to think of english as composed entirely by a single series of characters. Most typewriters were too simplistic to be able to conveniently place the quotation mark above the period.
So various style guidelines prescribed different rules based on trying to emulate as well as possible the typographic conventions which the typewriter couldn't actually mimic. Putting the period first more closely emulates the quotation marks over period because the quotation marks look less out of place being separated from the text than the period does.
Incidentally the rule you gave about non-period punctuation was wrong -- at least according to the style guidelines I'm aware of (MLA and Chicago agree on this I believe). Non-period punctuation goes inside or outside the quotation marks depending on whether the punctuation would have been part of the quote. That is, for example, "Help!" she screamed.
Penny said:
A 12-year old had given a puzzle–what 4-letter common male name can change the first letter to the next letter of the alphabet and create another 4-letter common male name.
My husband and I thought it was Mick and Nick.
Did anyone else come up with something else?
They're not *that* common, but what about Raul and Saul?
Grant Barrett said:
Penny said:
A 12-year old had given a puzzle–what 4-letter common male name can change the first letter to the next letter of the alphabet and create another 4-letter common male name.
My husband and I thought it was Mick and Nick.
Did anyone else come up with something else?
They're not *that* common, but what about Raul and Saul?
Not to mention Paul.
“Why is an undesirable task called a g-job?”
I worked in Silicon Valley long-enough ago that I remember when the Internet was just a few shell utilities, but not so long that I've made much practical use of punch cards. As I tell my children: "Back when I was your age, the World Wide Web was called 'books' and when the library was closed, you might have to wait a few days or ask lots of people to research a question. It was all we had." Still, I can't recall anyone using "g-job" there in the way you describe: something that elicits an "Aw Gee" response.
However, I do recall the use of the "G" in that context to refer to "The Government," and work for the government holding a certain negative connotation. This is also seen in the phrase "Close enough for government work," used to mean "just barely good enough to qualify," and the job associated with the project would then be a "g-job."
While I'm sure there are variants of this use with very specific meaning in different areas where government contracts are common, at least in the software industry government work takes a very different path from other types of development. Many of the common commercial technology products are created through the inspiration and creativity of the engineers involved, and so much of the ongoing drive to build those products is the creation of something exciting. Government contracts, by contrast, are bid-for by the company and arrive to the engineers as a huge book of specifications -- the product is built to do what that external specification says. To many, this implementation part is the "grunt work" and the architecture of the project is the "artistic/fun piece" removed from the government job.
To distill that to its more general meaning, the g-job is something uncreative that needs to get done to pay the bills, as contrasted to work you do because you enjoy it. In the same context, it implies poor workmanship: something that gets done barely to the letter of specification, but nobody's going to put any extra effort into it.
I leave it as an exercise to the reader as to how this reflects on a societal view of government.
You might want to rethink your position on the positioning of punctuation with respect to quotes. for reference I direct you to Victor Yngve's work on the mechanical translation of language.[1][2][3][4] I took a course on COMIT from Victor in 1968. There is also something called “Regular expression”[5][6][7], which “… are used by many text editors, utilities, and programming languages to search and manipulate text based on patterns.”
In general quotes, double, single, left, and right, are used to set off a word or phrase which is to be taken as a whole. To embed anything in this offset only complicates the process of parsing.
Commas are usually used to set off elements in a list or set off parenthetical information. The only confusion occurs when you use both in the same sentence. It is preferable to have a comma before the and denoting the last element in a list. However, it is treated as white noise or confirming redundancy.
Periods are used to mark the end of a sentence, or abbreviation, or initialism.
I realize there at least three forms of language, pidgin(<1000 words), creole(~5000 words), and proper(>20,000 words)[8][9]. Pidgins are very restricted, primitive, and consistent. Creoles start developing more complex rules. Proper languages are the most rich and complex and tend to carry vestiges from their roots.
I only point this out because now that people are using code to search writings, you might want to maximize your chances of mechanical parsers getting the gist of what you are saying rather than having them “throw up their hands” and say, “I have no idea what this person is trying to say!” The person of whom you are trying to get their attention may ignore you because of your punctuation. Or worse, government spyware might incorrectly decide you are a “no-good-nik” or is it nogoodnik? .Personally it doesn't bother me how people punctuate their sentences. I like puzzles. By the way, my last name is an inter-lingual play on words. Can you figure out what it is? And it won't help you to know I'm hanging out here in Hawai‘i.
[1] http://humanities.uchicago.edu/depts/linguistics/faculty/yngve.html Victor Yngve's web page at the University of Chicago
[2] http://www.computer-dictionary-online.org/COMIT%20II.htm?q=COMIT%20II Comit II
[3] http://hopl.murdoch.edu.au/showlanguage.prx?exp=19
[4] http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=8047 The MIT Press
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression Wikipedia
[6] http://www.regular-expressions.info/
[7] http://regexlib.com/ How the computing community views text parsing.
[8] http://www1.harenet.ne.jp/~waring/papers/cup.html Vocabulary size.
[9] http://www.geocities.com/yvain.geo/dialects.html Dialect Map of American English.
Leo, I've tried to defend my grammar usage with logic too. Unfortunately, common usage often seems to be invincibly illogical.
(And yes, I prefer putting the punctuation in a logical place -- otherwise your meaning can be lost.)
And I could take a guess on what the pun in your name would be, but right now I sem to be stuck in a Spanish gutter, and I'm kind of hoping that's not the right track.
Homage
I have heard that other languages have boards of bureaucrats who control the pronunciation of their language and new words. English obviously doesn't. On your show, you often talk about the proper pronunciation of words. Is the proper pronunciation the one most often used? On your show, you discussed “homage” which can be pronounced many different ways. So how is the pronunciation determined?
Michael, in English, dictionaries are the primary resource we have for learning what is considered acceptable pronunciation. Of course, there's no single answer for some words. Dictionaries differ because they are compiled using different principles, or because they are out-dated, misguided, or mistake-ridden. In general, pronunciation is determined for dictionaries based upon how a word is most commonly spoken. They do this by collecting lots of audio of speech and analyzing it. This way of acknowledging the speech of the majority generally works well.
Where it falls down, however, is that it can still leave out large groups of people who pronounce a word a different way but yet do not constitute a majority. These groups are mainly made of dialect-speakers. Dialect pronunciations aren't wrong, they're just different. Dialects, even in the US, are largely poorly represented in dictionary pronunciations, though dictionaries usually do very well in accounting for dialects' lexical differences.
Then we have have the common misunderstandings about pronunciation, in which people (too many who are "mavens") insist that the only right way is how they say it, or how they learned it when they were in school, or how they believe it was said in the past, or how it *looks* like it should be pronounced. These four common claims are basically indefensible positions but it's very difficult to dissuade people to abandon them, generally because they have a social or cultural stake in protecting a particular kind of English that they believe to represent a higher status. They're snobs.
So, in short, as English-speakers we all decide pronunciation by consensus. It's the only way that's accurate.
For a good summary of how we judge others by how they speak, and why many of our commonly held beliefs about accent and dialect are wrong, I highly recommend English with an Accent by Rosina Lippi-Green.
I have to disagree with you about the punctution question, too. I'll assume you are correct in your answer, since you are "the voices of God," (haha) but as far as your opinions on what looks right go, I disagree. Do you honestly think it looks good to end a sentence "like this"? To me it looks like you added an extra book on the wrong side of the bookend!
By the way, I am so glad my favorite radio show is back on the air!
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