The world of politics tops this week’s language headlines, including an explanation of the Bradley effect, and the ongoing debate over bilingual education. Also, what does the word fubsy mean? Grant has the answer and reports about a new favorite blog described as “lolcats for smart people.”
Transcript of “Language Headlines (minicast)”
We’re delighted that you’re listening to A Way with Words by podcast, but if you’d also like to hear us on your local public radio station, why not tell them about it? Public radio does listen to its listeners. Just go to our website at waywordradio.org slash listen. You’ll find links to public radio stations nationwide. Look for yours and then send them a quick email about why you want to hear A Way with Words. And if you do, please take another moment to email us and let us know. That way we can follow up with your station and we can thank you personally. Now on with the show. This is the latest language news from A Way with Words.
I’m Grant Barrett. Oh, what a difference a letter can make. The Moscow Times reports this week that Tatiana Tetrachina was stripped of her Russian citizenship because a government clerk’s typewriter was missing a single letter. Instead, a different vowel was used, making her Tetrachina rather than Tetrachina and making who she said she was and who her paper said she was disagree. Public outcry over the matter has since caused her citizenship to be reinstated. But Tatiana is still pursuing it in the Russian courts. In Slate magazine, Eugene Volokh takes a look at names that are so weird that they were brought before the courts. There’s the nine-year-old New Zealand girl named Tallulah does the hula from Hawaii. Yes, that’s the entire name.
There’s someone named they, th e y. There’s Darren Lloyd Bean spelled Darren Qx Bean and more Santa clauses than a Santa Claus convention. Caroline Winter fills in for William Sapphire in the New York Times magazine where she discusses why we capitalize the pronoun I. She says in short, the lowercase I is hard to see on the page. But an uppercase I is a cinch to read. She suggests just for a little self humbling that we capitalize you, why oh you instead?
Also in the New York Times, Nicholson Baker gives a favorable review to Am and Shay’s book Reading the OED, in which he spent an entire year reading the print version of the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Baker calls the book oddly inspiring and says the effect of this book on me was to make me like Am and Shay and briefly to hate English. Finally, dictionary editor Erin McKean asks in the Boston Globe why people use a word and then sheepishly wonder if it is really a word. She writes whenever I see not a real word used to stigmatize.
What is usually a perfectly cromulent word, I wonder why the writer felt the need to hang a big sign reading.
I am not confident about my writing on it. What do they imagine the penalty is for using an unreal word? A ticket from the dictionary police?
Cromulent by the way is a made-up word from the Simpsons.
It means good or fine and okay fine. That’s all for this week’s language headlines.
You can find links to all of these stories on the discussion forum of A Way with Words, Public radio’s weekly call-in show about language. Find it at waywordradio.org for A Way with Words.
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Ever since it started looking like Barack Obama was more than a long shot for his party’s nomination, pollsters, and pundits have been talking about the “Bradley effect.”
It’s when polls show a black political candidate way out in front. And yet, when the votes are cast, the black candidate barely wins or doesn’t even win at all.
As William Safire writes in the New York Times, the expression comes from Tom Bradley’s loss of the governorship of California in 1982. Then, polls predicted that he would win, but, in fact, he lost by a small margin. Many people felt that Bradley, who was black, lost because hidden racists wouldn’t admit to pollsters their true intentions.
Also in the campaign coverage is an ongoing discussion of bilingual education.
Is it better to teach immigrant children only in English or should we teach them in a language they already know? That’s the premise of a debate on the New York Times Education Watch blog. The presidential candidate’s views come under some scrutiny by a couple of experts, but most interesting are the reader comments.
One wrote, “I am struck by how much the debate about the quantity of English in the classroom quickly devolves from a sensible search for the best strategy, to an ideological war that produces some very silly teaching strategies.”
Speaking of campaigns, ever heard of the word fubsy? Well, British dictionary publisher Collins is threatening to cut that and other archaic words from its dictionaries. It’s mainly a public relations effort, but they’ve succeeded in bringing out the word-lovers to nominate and mull favorite archaic words of their own. Fubsy, by the way, means “short and stout.”
And finally, it’s the latest in a long line of many similar sites, but a new favorite blog is Wordsplosion. There you’ll find photographs of English gone wrong. Like the grocery store sign that says “dairy choices.” And under that it says “cheese and cheese.”
