Grant has the latest headlines from the world of language, including the debate over the name of the home of the 2008 Summer Olympics. Is Beijing pronounced bay-JING or bay-ZHING? Also, a recent court decision concerning an offense that’s coming to be known as “talking while Spanish.” And what’s the origin of the phrase the skinny?
Transcript of “Language Headlines (minicast)”
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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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Two stories out of the recently ended Olympics:
At MSNBC there’s a dispute over whether the city is Bay-JING or Bay-ZHING.
And at the London Times, Ben Macintyre talks about China’s national effort to eradicate Chinglish, that awkward and sometimes funny mix of English and Chinese that shows up on signs and menus. That means no more corrugated iron beef or government abuse chicken! The Financial Times goes into more detail.
June Casagrande, author of Mortal Syntax: A Hundred and One Language Choices That Will Get You Clobbered by the Grammar Snobs—Even If You’re Right, says in the Burbank Leader that often people ask her to comment on how technology is changing language, what with its acronyms and abbreviated words. She tells them it’s no big deal and to not blame the children. She says, “My message is: Put down the mallet and step away from your kid’s Blackberry.”
In last week’s Ethicist column in the New York Times magazine, Randy Cohen responded to a reader who asked if it was okay if he, as a fourth-grade teacher, tried to correct the regional accents of his students. Cohen replies, “You should not strive to make your students speak like network news anchors.” No doubt that is not the last he’s going to hear about that.
On his Web of Language web site, linguist Dennis Baron writes about an offense that has come to be called “talking while Spanish.” In the case, U.S. district court judge J. Thomas Marten ruled that an English-only policy at St. Anne Catholic School in Wichita, Kansas, violated no laws and that the school could, if it wished, expel children for speaking in Spanish on the playground.
Michael Quinion gives the skinny on the skinny in the 600th issue of his World Wide Words newsletter. The short version of it is that it dates to at least as early as the 1930’s and could maybe possibly perhaps simply have been coined as a way of saying “the naked truth,” with “skin” being the link between the two expressions.
