Maybe Rhyming Words Can Sound the Same

One of my favorite poems is Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat”. I know at least one first-grade teacher who dares not read it aloud to her students these days, but I used to read it aloud a lot to Doug and Adam — both the Little Golden Books version that’s on loan from Mom and Dad (who used to read it to my sister Ellen), and a newer version that Jan Brett illustrated. I like that you can sing it to the tune of “Beep-Beep” and have it match right down to the repetitions at the end of each verse; that when Doug was a toddler he’d say “you elegant fowl” as “you elephant fowl”; and that piggy-wig is an exception to Steven Pinker’s rule on rhyming nonsense pairs.

However, I cannot abide Edward Lear’s limericks.

Caller-ID Pragmatics

Several years ago I head a phone conversation that started off like this. I answered the phone: “Hello?”

“Hi!” said a woman whose voice I didn’t recognize. “Who’s this?”

“Uh, who’s this?” I responded.

The caller stood firm: “Who is this?” Now she sounded a little testy.

“I’m the guy who answered the phone when you called,” I said. “Who’s this?”

20 Questions, and Irreflexive In

Doug and Adam and I were playing 20 Questions while we waited for our food to arrive one night. The domain was places; the game went down something like this… [cue harp music]

Fully Frontally Nude

We went to see The Simpsons Movie (shouldn’t it be The The Simpsons Movie) last week. Of course, since it was a PG-13 movie, we checked the parent-oriented reviews. It seemed like the main thing that bumped it from PG to PG-13 scene was some full frontal nudity, so I figured it was OK. The author of the review had an annoying habit of referring to the relevant scene as the “full-frontal scene.” Is nudity the only thing that can be fully frontal? What about assaults, lobotomies, and snogging?

One spoiler follows.

Veridical-Minded

Driving around our neighborhoods, I see graduation banners for the class of 2007 posted in front yards here and there. This year, I’m seeing an added detail: In addition to a message like, “Congratulations, Nicole! 2007,” there will be a line indicating what college the graduate will be attending: “OSU bound!” I haven’t seen any that say, “Taking a year off!”, even though I read a story in the paper some months ago with that said in the opening paragraph:

More students are taking a year off before going straight to college.

I remembered the article because that sentence puzzled me. If a student takes a year off, and then goes to college, I reasoned, the student is not going straight to college.

Well, so what? When Belloq says to Indiana Jones,

Please, sit down before you fall down.

he is not requesting that Indy first sit, and then fall. When your mother says,

You’d better stop doing that before you go blind.

the idea is not to stop and then go blind, but to stop and not go blind (perhaps just ending up having to wear glasses).

Don’t Mention It

A couple of weeks ago, when I read that a member of the cast of Grey’s Anatomy named Isaiah Washington told a reporter at the Golden Globe awards,

No, I did not call [co-star] T. R. [Knight] a faggot. Never happened.

I had two reactions. One: Someone must have said he called T. R. Knight a faggot. Two: That was kind of an awkward denial. Oh, well.

Over the next week, I became aware that not only his alleged name-calling, but also the denial was getting him into trouble. I was puzzled at first. People were talking about his gaffe at the Golden Globes and I didn’t know what they meant. It was only when I read in one story, “Mr. Washington moved to the microphone and denied that he had ever used the slur to describe Mr. Knight, at the same time repeating the word” that I realized they really were talking about the denial, not the actual insult. Arnold Zwicky has written a cogent linguistic perspective on the whole incident, starting off with the point that was the source of my confusion: Washington did not use the word faggot, he mentioned it. I particularly like this sentence from his conclusion:

Believing that some words are so intrinsically offensive that they should never be uttered, even to describe their offensiveness or to report on offensive uses, is believing in verbal magic.

But now that I’ve thought about the matter some more, I think I can understand at least a little bit the discomfort/offense/outrage at Washington’s mention of the word in his denial. First of all, I’m not so sure anymore that call [someone] a faggot is a mention of faggot rather than a use. Faggot has two syllables is a mention; I never said he was a faggot is a use; I never called him a faggot I’d say is a use, too. It’s not saying anything about the word faggot; it’s a sentence about whether the individual denoted by him is in the set denoted by faggot. But let me call it a mention, for the sake of argument. It reminded me of something that happened with Doug and Adam not too long ago… yes, I’m remembering it now… screen.. getting.. wavy.. harp music.. playing…

“What’s so funny?” my wife was asking Doug and Adam. They were laughing hysterically in the next room.

Adam told her. Apparently, Doug had been telling Adam something funny that had happened that day, something that involved somebody farting. As Adam relayed the story to his mom, he used Doug’s words, including the word fart.

My wife hates the word fart. For her, it’s not a funny word that you just have to laugh when you hear (like booger), but a disgusting word that’s just as bad as that other f-word (aside from finesse). Adam, of course, knows this, so he thoughtfully apologized before his mom could say anything:

I’m sorry I said “fart,” Mom. I only said “fart” because Doug said “fart” and I was telling you that he said “fart.”

I don’t remember whether Adam used or mentioned fart the first time, but the last four times were definitely mentions, not uses, and yet it was those mentions, not the original use, that irritated my wife the most. Clearly, Adam was hiding behind the use/mention distinction in order to launch a few penalty-free farts. It would have been easy enough to say that word instead of fart if his apology had been pure, but he chose to repeat fart four times, which transformed his mention into, I guess you’d call it a meta-use.

Now Isaiah Washington said faggot only once during his denial, so why the uproar? I think it probably would have been OK if he’d said something like, “Faggot is a demeaning and inappropriate label to put on anyone, and I never used it to refer to T. R. or anyone else.” I think his castmates’ unease, and other people’s outrage, arose from reasoning along the following lines:

1. You have already been accused of using the word faggot with malicious intent.
2. Therefore, one would expect you to exercise greater-than-normal caution in using or mentioning this word when discussing the incident, to avoid giving the impression that you habitually use this word.
3. You chose not to do so.
4. Therefore, it seems you think the accusation is not to be taken seriously.
5. Therefore, it seems you are the kind of person who thinks it’s OK to call people faggot.

That, plus the re-assertion by fellow castmembers that he really did call T. R. Knight a faggot, was enough to require the now-standard celebrity public-contrition routine.

Retain vs. Re-elect

Ann Fisher, a columnist for the Columbus Dispatch, had an eye-opening piece yesterday. She talks about a gambit used by political parties…

…in which the incumbent resigns before his term ends.

The party then appoints a replacement who has the advantage of incumbency in the next election. This is legal. Politicians and their party leaders, be they Democrats or Republicans, sometimes plot such shifts weeks, months, or even years in advance.

The point is that both parties do it. But they don’t like to admit as much because the idea offends some voters.
Ann Fisher, “Both parties love to play monkey move up,” The Columbus Dispatch, Oct. 23, 2006, p. D1)

The idea certainly offends me, so I was glad to read Fisher’s next paragraph, which offered some information I could use:

How can you tell the difference…? Look for the campaign signs urging voters to “retain” instead of “re-elect” a candidate.

A-ha! I’ve seen those signs, and never realized the significance of the wording. But now that Fisher has laid it out for me, I see it’s a clear case of Q-based narrowing. As I wrote a couple of years ago, “[Q-based narrowing] happens when word B denotes a specific kind of what word A denotes. Eventually, word A comes to be used as if it refers to everything word A denotes except for the things that word B denotes.” Here, word A is retain, and word B is re-elect, a specific way of retaining someone. If you can unambiguously and truthfully say re-elect, implicating that a candidate was good enough to get elected before, why on earth would you choose the less specific retain? You wouldn’t, and now retain on campaign posters is used to refer only to keeping someone in office who wasn’t elected to it.

Adam’s Pragmatics Lesson

“I’m stopping at the drugstore on the way home to get some more eyeliner,” my wife announced as the four of us got ready to leave the place where we’d met her for dinner. “Does anyone need anything from there?”

Adam thought for a second, and then asked, “Will you look for anything I might like at the drugstore?”

“Sure, I’d be happy to do that, Adam!”

As we walked to the car, Adam did a few excited hops, while I was thinking about the exchange between him and his mom. That’s pretty neat, I thought. Asking her to look for something he might like when he couldn’t think of anything was a nice example of the kind of flexible thinking that Adam just didn’t do a couple of years ago. Ask him an open-ended question like that, and all you’d get was silence or an “I don’t know.” And just listen to how he naturally employed the Maxim of Relevance in his request: He just asked her to look for stuff he’d like, not actually asking her to buy it, knowing that part was understood. This is the kind of stuff that’s notoriously hard for kids on the autism spectrum to get.

So I guess I should have restrained myself when we were all buckled in and Adam said,

In an Abusive Relationship

“Aha!” Mom said one day during her visit last week, as she read Dear Abby. “I knew there’d be some letters about this guy!”

“What guy?” I asked.

Mom explained: A few weeks earlier, there had been a letter written by a man who said he’d been in an abusive relationship. The letter was strange, not because it had been written by a man (since both men and women can be victims of abuse), but because as you read the letter you realized that the writer had been the abuser, not the abused.

The Beloved Sounds of Pachelbel’s Canon in D

We got a set of windchimes last week that maybe one of these days I’ll get around to hanging somewhere outside. When I opened up the box, there was a little card explaining that these windchimes would play Pachelbel’s Canon in D. Now that was an amazing breakthrough in windchime technology. Apparently, the makers had somehow figured out how to make the chimes sound in a particular order so as to play the famous Canon in D. This I had to hear. How had they done it? Was there a motor in there or something?