Say What?

Mark Liberman posted a very interesting entry about Bushisms that I thought was worth noting. He explains that certainly, anyone in the public eye receives more scrutiny than the average joe. However, our qualms with our president's language have risen to an epidemic level. In fact, Jacob Wiseberg has made a killing off recording Bush's every blip and blunder--even when several of the quotation sources have been questionable. The majority of his speech errors, though, are by no means extraordinarily abhorrent uses of language. Robert Beard, for instance, is a trained linguist and CEO of yourdictionary.com. But despite highly honed language skills, a letter he wrote to Mark Liberman contained three conspicuous grammatical errors, some akin to the sort our President makes.

I liked this article because it demonstrated how our biases heavily influence how we perceive another person's speech. I'm certainly no Dubya proponent nor am I arguing that he is a stellar speaker, but I do think he gets a bit of an unfair reputation, especially considering that a number of the Bushism quotes may be fudged. I remember a high school history teacher who told me Bush scored 900 on the SAT's. Was it true? Nope--Bush actually scored in the 1200's, back before test scores were adjusted (by today's standards, it'd be closer to the 1300's). But people believe it because it fuels the opinions they already have formed about a person. In truth, though, Bush likely does not make any more blunders than the average person (and less than the average person, when you consider he's in the spotlight so much). Granted, considering the prominent position he has, one might say that he should be doing a better job than he is. I'm not going to argue with that. But the conclusions that some people are drawing--that Bush is an idiot because he said "misunderestimate"--are not quite on the mark.

I thought this tied in well with the issue of language and prejudice that we've been discussing all semester, especially in Erard. It'd be nice to live in a world where ums, uhs, and eggcorns weren't overly scrutinized by people who have it in for you. But we seem unwilling to divorce our biases from the way a person speaks. And this is unfortunate, because, in all honesty, if you're going to Bush bash, find a well grounded, demonstrable, political reason to do so (I can name a few...). But when it comes to belittling him for eight years over language errors that have little to do with is intelligence--can't we get over that?

Language Log

The semester is at its close, and I came to realize that throughout the course of writing From the Field entries, I hadn't yet stopped by The Language Log. Once I opened the page, I was surprised to see how many topics were explored. Especially interesting to me was the page on Eggcorns, as even long after reading Um, I've been fascinated by the phenomenon, because it really highlights the not-so-uncommon discrepancy between perception and reality.

The entry focused on the prevalence of eggcorns (like hand few for handfull, or eggcorn itself instead of acorn). The methods used were, well, none other than google search! Determining how often an eggcorn appeared in a search (in comparison to the original word) can yield a vague estimate of how many people use any particular eggcorn. While the number of English speakers who think that eggcorns, for instance, grow on trees is small, it is by no means an insignificant number. As Mark Liberman notes, "the misconstrual is probably not going to spread -- the influence of the standard written language is too strong -- but it's not going to go away either."

What I especially liked about the entry, however, was that it emphasized the positive attributes of eggcorns. Usually people are ridiculed for not using language "correctly," and I think this is especially true for eggcorns. But the Language Log entry casts this sort of slip up in a different light, stating that "it would be so easy to dismiss eggcorns as signs of illiteracy and stupidity, but they are nothing of the sort. They are imaginative attempts at relating something heard to lexical material already known."

Really, this quote makes me think of how humans even make sense of the world. Each of us is obviously limited in our knowledge database, and when we encounter something new, we try to fit it in with the pre-existing data. One note I found unsettling, however, was that Mark Liberman hypothesizes that eggcorns are more common among those "who are not over-literate or whose writing system is not highly standardized." I'm not quite sure I agree with this point. Certainly, I can understand that those whose language is standardized are less likely to use eggcorns, since eggcorns emerge as a deviant form of a standard word. But implying that education correlates negatively with eggcorn use seems problematic to me. After all, in college, a person is exposed to a whole new set of words, concepts, and jargon. It seems to me that the chances of misperceiving this new set of language, then, might rise with this additional exposure.

Ultimately, though, this article reminded me of Erard's progressive thinking in Um. Sometimes our verbal slip ups are the most fascinating, revealing, and creative parts of language. Instead of using these errors to judge others (and usually doing so in an attempt to pardon our on prejudices), we should focus on the opportunities they present us to study human perception, language, and psychology.

The Language Log Entry

Chapter 15 interested me quite a bit because it brought to light the collision between the Al-Sayyid way of life and what is seen as appropriate in Western societies. In particular, I thought the genetic counseling was a tricky business. Certainly, parents should have the interests of their children at heart if they plan to have kids. At the same time, though, the geneticists eerily reminded me of Alexander Graham Bell's response to deaf communities--his fear being that two deaf people should by no means marry, as to do so would be devastating for the child. But as we've seen throughout Talking Hands, deafness is not quite the disability Western societies make it out to be. For the Al-Sayyid Bedouins, is it a disability at all? Should they be discouraged from intermarrying, considering all the negative impacts they would face in abandoning their present way of life?

I couldn't really come up with a question to the last two chapters that we read so I decided to ask a broad question dealing with the ideas we have talked about all semester. Throughout the past few months we have discussed things in speech that we do everyday but never paid particular attention to. Such things as disfluencies and gestures are commonly found in our speech but I think we can all say that we actually pay attention to them now as we speak. Even with the ideas that were brought up with sign language dealing with gestures and how they actually form a language whereas before many of us didn't even think of signs as a real language. All of these ideas have given us such an insight on something that occurs everyday and plays an important part in our lives. I know that we all pay more attention to speech now especially our own but I was wondering if these ideas have affected everyone's speech and if you think it will continue to affect your speech or if you will still use disfluencies and gestures without thinking about what they can mean? Especially dealing with um and uh in speeches because we all know that it is not necessarily a bad thing to do but so many others frown upon it. Do you still think it is important to rid those kinds of things out of your speech to fit with everyone else's ideas of speech?

Since this is the last day of class, it seemed appropriate to create a type of cumulative question that brings all of our knowledge together. I was interested in the geneticist who visited Al-Sayyid and said "if they don't start marring outside the village, they'll all be deaf." Fox already acknowledges that this geneticist is, whether intentionally or not, forcing Western values on a culture "where it was not especially relevant." We've talked about these occurrences before (Native Americans, the Oralist movement, "standard" English). What have you learned about these cultural enforcements, and, more broadly, what have you taken away in terms of stereotypes, discrimination, inequality and language? Have your views been changed--or will they revert back to your once-held beliefs once Psych 440 is finished?

I think that overall ABSL is especially interesting because it differs from other signed languages; it shows us how much flexibility there is when it comes to communication. The example of ABSL has allowed me to better understand just how arbitrary language can be, and how easily one language can use inflection while another uses strict word order to convey the same concepts. People have a drive to communicate and a drive for structure in their behavior, but there is a wide range of possibilities for this structure. Fox suggests that perhaps by the end of the Al-Sayyid project we would be able to definitively say what constitutes a language, "what we mean when we talk about a 'full-fledged language'" (p.274). We've talked a lot about the difference between pidgins, creoles, and languages, but where are the lines, can we really define where the border is between a creole and a language? Can we consider a communication system a language before it has a solid morphological system? And the sign of Al-Sayyid that still shows signs of trouble with phonology? The author quotes Wendy saying with regards to the language-ness of ABSL that “We don’t know, but if it looks like a language and walks like a language and quacks like a language, then it’s a language” (p. 283). I’m still really curious about the rationale behind who speaks a language and who speaks a dialect, and a little afraid that the answer really is that the language speakers are the ones with an army.