Thursday, October 25, 2007

Got Me Pegged?

For one of my classes this semester, my professor asked each of us to write a profile of another student. My classmate, Conor, had the task of writing about -- you guesssed it -- me. I found his assessment to be both funny and pretty accurate, and so I thought it would be fun to post the text of it here. I do have to say, acting as the subject of a piece certainly made me think differently about my own reporting! Thanks, Conor. Enjoy!

The Purple Prose of Tracy Bratten

By Conor Friedersdorf

On Sundays Ms. Tracy Bratten savors William Safire’s “On Language” column in the New York Times—“I quite enjoy his tone,” she confides—and her own language blog, Let’s Talk Nerdy, traffics in linguistic accidents. Consider a recent post that recalls a colleague’s inquiry about the difference between further and farther.

“These are the kinds of questions that make me tick,” Ms. Bratten mused.

Ms. Bratten’s pedantic quirk (which despite her habit of double entendre involves no facial twitching of her green eyes) is perhaps an unsurprising pleasure for an aspiring Manhattan journalist. She is a 25-year-old J-school student. Upon visiting the Museum of Modern Art she critiqued the prose of its placards. She once noted, “I'm not sure that there is anything that bothers me more than people who write ‘loose’ when they mean to write ‘lose.’”

Tick. Tick. Tick.

And boom! For the notion that Ms. Bratten is a Northeastern snob is quickly exploded by certain other pleasures seldom shared by linguistic pedants, among them her love of Longhorn football and the fact that she “craves red meat like a Texan who drinks Budweiser should.”

This last pleasure is the subject of another blog entry on Anheuser Busch, in which she quotes from memory the language that appears on the Budweiser label:

This is the famous Budweiser beer. We know of no brand produced by any other brewer which costs so much to brew and age. Our exclusive Beechwood Aging produces a taste, a smoothness and a drinkability you will find in no other beer at any price.

Of this passage, Ms. Bratten writes that “It's a bit of a phenomenon, really, that three sentences could have such far-reaching - cult-like, even - implications. I am a loyal Budweiser aficionado, and therefore thought it necessary that I post a link to some great Budweiser literature.”

Ahem. “Great… literature?” As an experienced surveyor of beer cans and bottles alike, from Rolling Rock’s invocation of the “glass lined tanks of Old Latrobe” to the antique blue ribbon that Pabst has pathetically clung to since a county fair in the late 1800s, I submit that a sneakier passage doesn’t exist in the world of brew. The weasel words “we know of” begin it—perhaps Bud’s brew masters are conveniently ignorant?—and then there is the matter of calculations: as the American beer produced in the largest quantities of course more is spent on Budweiser than any other beer, but is it the most expensive to produce per 12 ounces?

That Ms. Bratten reproduces this passage uncritically on her language blog shouldn’t be taken as a sign that she is obtuse or careless—she is neither. Rather it underscores the reality that although she is a New York journalist-in-training, she also possesses a less ironic and cynical side, a more sentimental identity, a cultural outlook sometimes more Red State than Blue state, so that unlike most young journalists one meets these days she is a self-described conservative whose true hue doesn’t exist on the Fox News map, for it is a purple only slightly more red than blue, more denim than pinstripes.

“I root for the Astros and the Yankees,” she says, “and if they ever played in the World Series my heart would be torn. But I’d root for the Astros.”

On the other hand, although she likes country music and has performed dance steps from Texas-style line dancing to hip-hop, her preferred genre is tap, of which she writes, “Like English and Spanish, tap dance consists of words and phrases, patterns, truths and lies.” On some days, in some moods, she seems a purple slightly more blue than red.

Delve into her biography and it all fits.

She was born and raised in Houston to devoutly Christian mother (works with special needs kids) and father (builds custom McMansions). She came of age at the University of Texas at Austin, the bluest city in the Lone Star State, and among her friends she counts many from her home town who are now pregnant or already mothers, and many more from college who now live in New York City. The end product of this education: when she isn’t reading On Language she might well be engrossed in Harry Potter.

Is Tracy Bratten the bridge between Red and Blue America? Are her self-aware and yet unaffected cultural preferences the mark of some inner-strength and aesthetic independence the rest of us lack? These are the kinds of hyperbolic, inaccurately dichotomous questions one cannot imagine Tracy Bratten posing.

In fact, she has posed and answered them more elegantly in her own pedantic, folksy way on her blog, in an entry that sums up this profile better than any other.

“I am proud to be from Texas,” she writes. “Though I don't have a ‘country’ accent, as I was raised in the suburban metropolis that is Houston, I certainly appreciate the slow drawl and sharp twang that is indicative of many a Texan's Lone Star roots. ‘Y'all’ is part of my vocabulary, and I am not opposed to ‘ain't.’ I embraced such colloquialisms as "fixin' to" and such abbreviations as "prolly," though in my opinion it is only acceptable to adopt these gems of southern vernacular if and only if you are cognizant of the correct manner of speaking, in a manner of speaking. After all, would Picasso have been as successful in cubism if he had not first gained street cred by showing that he had raw artistic talent?”

Ultimately Tracy Bratten, through her language and her very life, calls us to eschew the false dichotomies of a so-called divided America by cultivating a more complicated understanding of those cultural attributes that are not our own. Prolly over an ice cold Bud.

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Come Out, Come Out


Dumbledore has tumbled out of the closet.

That's right, J.K. Rowling's wonderfully wise, wand-wielding wizard who captured the hearts of millions is, in fact, gay. News of the post-mortem outing of the fictional father fixture in Harry's life was blogged about and even mentioned on CNN. The Leaky Cauldron, a Web site devoted to all things Harry Potter, discusses it. Heck, even The New York Times has devoted words to the revelation. I have no qualms with the literary genius that is the Harry Potter series, however, my question is simply this: How is Dumbledore's sexuality relevant? Furthermore, why on earth has it become so prevalent a part of the discourse?

The best article I've found comes from Salon, and is definitely worth the read. Rebecca Traister writes:
Dumbledore's gayness is one of the pieces of bonus information about her characters that she's been dispensing steadily since the publication of her magical swan song, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows." Thanks to Rowling's loose lips, the Potter universe continues to make news even after its end. In her desire to control and describe it, she's turning a modern assumption about what authorship means inside out. Whoever said the author was dead sure hadn't meant Joanne Rowling.

Rowling outed Dumbledore at Carnegie Hall on Oct. 19, in response to a fan who asked her if Potter's powerful mentor, who believed so mightily in the power of love, had ever been in love himself. "My truthful answer to you," Rowling said, was that "I always thought of Dumbledore as gay." According to reports, this sentence drew an immediate ovation from the crowd. Rowling continued by explaining that Albus had, as a young man, fallen for the talented wand-wielder Gellert Grindelwald. Rowling's discussion of their bond, an important plot point in her last Harry Potter novel, was incisive and moving; she told the audience that Dumbledore's youthful passion for Grindelwald blinded him, as it does so many of us mere muggles, to Grindelwald's flaws, leaving him shattered when he discovered Grindelwald to be seriously evil. Rowling further revealed that at a recent read-through of the script for the sixth Harry Potter movie, she'd had to nix a line of dialogue about Dumbledore's affection for a young woman. She said she'd passed the screenwriter a note reading "Dumbledore's gay!"
My next question, then, is whether Richard Harris or Michael Gambon were let on to Dumbledore's little secret before they played him in the films. Traister continues:
I am a devoted reader and admirer of J.K. Rowling, and it honestly pains me a bit to say this, but from a literary perspective, she's out of control here. Her abundant generosity with information is surely a response to a vast, insatiable fan base that does not have a high tolerance for never-ending suspense, ambiguity or nuance. As she told the "Today" show's Meredith Vieira back in July, "I'm dealing with a level of obsession in some of my fans that will not rest until they know the middle names of Harry's great-great-grandparents."

Rowling naturally wants to provide answers for these heartbroken obsessives who perhaps are too young to know the satisfying pleasures of perpetual yearning and feel that they must must must know how much money Harry makes and whether Luna has kids.

It would also be understandable if, after more than a decade of telling stories about this world and these characters, Rowling is unable to stop. She has been a great and comprehensive builder of a fictional universe, and she's famous for keeping reams of folders containing the back stories and astrological signs of every major and minor character ever to appear in her pages. One of the things that made the Potter books so good was the sense that Rowling had utter mastery over every corner of her realm. Who could blame her for wanting to keep the kids happy by doling out bits of it? It's not as though Rowling would be setting a precedent: J.R.R. Tolkien spent much of his post-Middle-earth life tinkering with the details of the world he created, and delighting and gratifying his adherents by providing them with additional information about it.

But when too much of the back story (and, more disconcertingly, the future story) gets revealed –- especially in an age in which an author is not simply sending letters to readers as Tolkien did, but making utterances that will be disseminated and analyzed by a global network of Web sites -- it seems to have not so much a gratifying effect as a deadening one.
I, for one, don't understand the relevance of Dumbledore's sexuality to the text. I suppose one could argue that it offers readers a more thorough understanding of Dumbledore's relationship with Grindelwald, although after having read the books I was not left in need of such an affirmation. Perhaps it would be better to leave certain things to the imagination.

The word dumbledore is actually a 1787 Old English word for bumblebee, I learned on an episode of Who Wants to be a Millionaire last year (it so happened to be the $250,000 question). It's no surprise that Dumbledore's gayness has made headline news, but now that we all know, I'm sure he'd just as soon like for us all to buzz off. Or maybe J.K. Rowling herself should leave well enough alone.

And Today, At the Office...

"Supposably."

When will the madness end?

Monday, October 22, 2007

Oops! [He] Did It Again

That's right. In class today, my brilliant professor, once again, committed a word felony. Supposively...

Thursday, October 18, 2007

You Know You're a Nerd When...

Amazon.com sends you this e-mail:




I guess I should resign myself to a life of reading linguistics books as Queen of Nerdland. And don't worry, I've already read all seven Harry Potters.

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Move Over, Homer, This is MY Odyssey

Any semi-educated individual should be relatively familiar with Homer's The Odyssey, whose wandering protagonist spends ten years en route home to Ithaca after the fall of Troy. His brilliance and his hubris are perhaps his most notable character traits, but his epic, decade-long journey is far from facile.

An opinion piece in The New York Times this week discussed a different kind of odyssey: a stage in life that occurs between adolescence and adulthood and is marked by uncertainty, anxiety, fluidity, and prolonging inevitabilities.

The article, by Op-ed columnist David Brooks, discusses this new period of life as the least understood of all the life phases, perhaps only for its newness. He writes:
During this decade, 20-somethings go to school and take breaks from school. They live with friends and they live at home. They fall in and out of love. They try one career and then try another.

Their parents grow increasingly anxious. These parents understand that there’s bound to be a transition phase between student life and adult life. But when they look at their own grown children, they see the transition stretching five years, seven and beyond. The parents don’t even detect a clear sense of direction in their children’s lives. They look at them and see the things that are being delayed.

They see that people in this age bracket are delaying marriage. They’re delaying having children. They’re delaying permanent employment. People who were born before 1964 tend to define adulthood by certain accomplishments — moving away from home, becoming financially independent, getting married and starting a family.

In 1960, roughly 70 percent of 30-year-olds had achieved these things. By 2000, fewer than 40 percent of 30-year-olds had done the same.
If that isn't hitting the proverbial nail on the head, then I'm not sure what is. Perhaps it's because I am part of the vagabond 20-something demographic, but I applaud the definition of this new life-phase. In this sense, the word odyssey as a description for this particular period of life is semantically synonymous with the term adultalescence, which William Safire included in his On Language piece entitled "Campuspeak," the text of which I posted on October 7. Hallelujah! I'm not the only 20-something who has "graduate[d] into a world characterized by uncertainty, diversity, searching and tinkering," as Brooks notes Robert Wuthnow, social scientist at Princeton, explaining in his article.

Personal aside: I especially appreciate the part about delaying marriage, children, and employment, because a large group of my Texas friends are gainfully employed, married, and expecting. To date, I've either been a bridesmaid or in the house party of seven weddings (make that eight come November) -- not to mention the other handful I've been invited to -- and I have six pregnant friends and three with children already.

Mom, Dad, have no fear. Brooks continues:
The odyssey years are not about slacking off. There are intense competitive pressures as a result of the vast numbers of people chasing relatively few opportunities. Moreover, surveys show that people living through these years have highly traditional aspirations (they rate parenthood more highly than their own parents did) even as they lead improvising lives.
I'm 25 years young. I have two undergraduate degrees and two years of "real-world" work experience under my belt, and, come January, I'll be the proud holder of an M.A. The future is uncertain, though certainly bright, especially considering that in the footsteps of Odysseus, I figure I have at least three more years to wander.

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

I Might Have Gone Crazy

My ears are bleeding. I just overheard someone in my office say, "She might have went..."

Sunday, October 7, 2007

Totes Check It

I'm just going to go ahead and post the entire text of one of William Safire's latest On Language columns here. It usually appears in the Sunday edition of The New York Times. It's a good one.
Sketchy about the lingo being spoken by today’s adultalescents? As those in their late teens and early adulthood like to say, Ah-ite!

The sound of that last word is hard to convey on the printed page. The famous cry in comic books of a man being thrown out a window — Ai-ee-ee! — comes closer to the first semisyllable of the slurred word, but there is a hint of a t at the end. When you ask a young person conversant in this campuspeak (a word created on the analogy of George Orwell’s newspeak) a question like “Would you do this for me?” you are likely to hear the answer “Ah-ite.”

The meaning is “O.K.” The sound is an amalgam of all and right, which used to sound like “aw-rite” but now is compressed into a sliding “a’ight,” as the teen-slanguist Fred Lynch transcribes it.

Word-blending is big in campuspeak. “He’s sort of a nerd, but he’s just so adorkable” combines adorable with dork, the amalgam defined as “endearing though socially inept” by Prof. Connie Eble of the department of English and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Another blend is fauxhawk, combining faux, “artificial,” and Mohawk, defined as a “hairstyle achieved by combing all of the hair to the center to give the appearance of a Mohawk without shaving the head.”

Yet another is ginormous, blending gigantic with enormous (seeking to outstrip humongous, itself a dated slang blend of huge and monstrous and/or tremendous). The new slang blend submitted by members of Professor Eble’s English 314 class only a few months ago is chillax, from the adjective chill, “easygoing,” and the verb relax, the combo meaning “do nothing in particular,” an activity widely practiced in centers of learning throughout the nation.

Among the relatively new slang words: stella, “good-looking female,” from stellar, “starlike,” improbably influenced by the shouted name of Stanley Kowalski’s wife in Tennessee Williams’s “Streetcar Named Desire.” A synonym is shorty or shawty, imported from vintage hip-hop for “girlfriend of any height.” Such attractiveness is the opposite of the fast-fading butterface (“Great body, but her face. . . .”), and a less-than-good-looking male or female is a blockamore, who “only looks good from a block or more.”

Metaphor is teen slang at its most creative. The recent nose wide open, applied to either male or female friends, means “totally compliant,” perhaps from the older “to be led around by the nose.” (This is not to be confused with the Shakespearean Henry V’s exhortation to his troops going into battle at Harfleur to “set the teeth, and stretch the nostril wide.” The current slang synonym for the subservient shlepper is sprung.)

A rhyming metaphor is thigh five, “a celebratory gesture like a high five, except clapping together the fronts of the thighs, as football players do, instead of the palms of the hands.”

The most frequently used new term at Chapel Hill is sketchy, “of dubious character; shady, potentially dangerous.” Usage: “Those middle-aged men are so sketchy. They creep me out.” It is being substituted for the long-lasting ninja of the 1980s, from the Japanese for “stealthy, secretive.” Yesteryear’s in your face has been replaced by all up in your grill. Sources elsewhere tell me that the adjective crunchy applied to health-conscious, environmentally correct types is being overtaken by the attributive noun granola. Anyhoo (nobody says “anyhow” anymoo), at Rice University the blended compound adultalescence has for the past few years been defined as “the state of moving back in with one’s parents after college graduation.”

Other youthful slang sources concern themselves mainly with the vocabulary of the three subjects, other than scholarship and sports, apparently central to campus life: sex, booze and regurgitation. (If your response to that news is Duh, the latest definition of that sound is “Thank you, Captain Obvious.”)

I am not about to yam on (“humiliate”) readers with a lexicon of making purple or doing the do other than to note that the most original compound along the amatory line is the verb sexile, defined as “being locked out by your roommate who is using the premises for an assignation to which you are not invited.” This is somehow related to hallcest, the definition of which has not been vouchsafed to me, but I suspect it is an extreme example of what diplomats call “proximity talks.”

Thursday, October 4, 2007

!!!

Anybody remember the Seinfeld episode when Elaine broke up with the guy who didn't use exclamation points when he took down her messages? Her friend had a baby! This warrants an exclamation!

This article - aptly called "So Many Exclamation Points!" - that appeared in Slate reminded me of that episode. I, for one, will admit that in the initial stages of a relationship, any correspondence containing improper grammar or misuse of punctuation is an automatic strike. Remember, I'm the girl that smiles internally when I find mistakes in The New York Times. (That's right, kids. I'm as anal-retentive as they come - so punctuate those text messages!) Oh, and yes, I do think about these things.

Usually I'd quote sections of the article, but in this case, I think it's definitely worth the read. On second thought, make that: Worth the read!

To Ph.D. or not to Ph.D.?

As some of you may or may not know, I've recently been toying with the ridiculous idea that I might like to continue my career in academia by pursuing linguistics, perhaps even as a Ph.D. Crazy, maybe. This article in The New York Times certainly gave me something to think about. Among other caveats:
The average student takes 8.2 years to get a Ph.D.; in education, that figure surpasses 13 years. Fifty percent of students drop out along the way, with dissertations the major stumbling block. At commencement, the typical doctoral holder is 33, an age when peers are well along in their professions, and 12 percent of graduates are saddled with more than $50,000 in debt.
I'm not exactly sure how appealing the idea of completing a Ph.D. sounds when the reality might be that I'd emerge a 33-year-old-burned-out-(most likely) single-poor person, with "Dr." in front of my name.

Let's be honest, why am I even thinking about this? Well, linguistics excites me. I took courses (which I loved) in linguistics, grammar, syntax and phonetics in college, but they were all in Spanish. Plus, the idea of prolonging school is extremely enticing. Who knows what will happen!

As for now, I'm brushing up. I'm reading The Atoms of Language: The Mind's Hidden Rules of Grammar by Mark C. Baker, and next on my list is The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Stephen Pinker. These, of course, are in addition to the reading I am doing for school this semester -- a mere 26 books total.

I wasn't kidding when I said I'm a nerd.

Wednesday, October 3, 2007

Names and Nuptials

These are always fun to look at, and usually hard to believe! In this case, they present a great argument against hyphenating your name!









Tuesday, October 2, 2007

She's On Fire!

If something is flammable, according to Dictionary.com, it is "easily set on fire; combustible; inflammable."

That's right. Inflammable and flammable mean the same thing: easily ignited. So which came first, the chicken or the egg? Well, it seems that the word inflammable actually predates its more abbreviated version by about 200 years and, in fact, flammable only came about because inflammable was commonly mistaken to mean "nonflammable." Just imagine the consequences. In this case, the difference is huge.

According to The Columbia Guide to Standard American English:
Flammable and inflammable are synonyms, both meaning 'susceptible of or capable of catching fire and burning rapidly.' Inflammable was the word of choice for a long time, but fire-fighting associations and insurers, apparently concerned that the in- prefix would be misunderstood to mean 'un-' or 'non-' (which in another in prefix it does) decided to remove all doubt by labeling materials, gasoline trucks, and other things that can burn flammable. Both words are still in use, and both are Standard. Nonflammable, incombustible, and noncombustible are antonyms of flammable and inflammable: they mean 'fireproof.'
Dictionary.com explains it this way:
Inflammable and flammable both mean 'combustible.' Inflammable is the older by about 200 years. Flammable now has certain technical uses, particularly as a warning on vehicles carrying combustible materials, because of a belief that some might interpret the intensive prefix in- of inflammable as a negative prefix and thus think the word means 'noncombustible.' Inflammable is the word more usually used in nontechnical and figurative contexts: The speaker ignited the inflammable emotions of the crowd.
Wait a minute, so inflammable=flammable, but incombustible is the opposite of combustible? Yep. It's one of the (many) confusing beauties of our language. And to make matters even more confusing, although genius and ingenious mean virtually the same thing -- though be sure note the difference in spelling, not only concerning the existence or absence of the prefix 'in' -- the same is not true for famous and infamous. Unlike famous, infamous has a negative connotation.

Nonplussed yet? Relax. Just don't go lighting a match near anything that is "flammable" or "inflammable." In fact, a good rule of thumb might just be to avoid lighting matches near unknown substances no matter what. After all, as our good friend Smoky says, "Only you can prevent forest fires."

Just One Thing...

If my professer uses the not-word supposively one more time, I think I'm going to request a refund from NYU.