Nathan Bierma: The Complete Series

It’s a bittersweet moment when you see a boxed set of DVDs for a show you liked, like Freaks and Geeks or Firefly, and the subtitle says not “Season 1″ or “Season 4″ or what have you, but “The Complete Series”. On the one hand, you get the entire series! On the other hand, bummer — they can only say “The Complete Series” when the series is over, and they can only fit it into one boxed set when it got canceled after just a season or two. That’s the feeling I’ve been getting as I read Nathan Bierma’s The Eclectic Encyclopedia of English, published just this year by the same people who brought you Far From the Madding Gerund. (Yes, it’s another piece of blog swag: Editor Tom Sumner at William, James & Co. sent it to me personally.) Nathan Bierma was The Chicago Tribune’s answer to William Safire of The New York Times Magazine and Jan Freeman of The Boston Globe. I say was not because he’s dead (at least as of this writing), but because the column ran only from 2004 to 2008. The EEE is a collection of Bierma’s columns from this time period.

Bierma’s style is more like Jan Freeman’s than William Safire’s; as the blurb on the back from Erin McKean states, he’s “interested more in the ‘why?’ of language than the ‘don’ts.’” His background is mainly in teaching English, but he has a regular set of linguists, etymologists, and lexicographers that he calls upon to offer insights on whatever question he’s writing about, among them Grant Barrett, Anatoly Liberman, Mark Liberman, Erin McKean, Geoff Nunberg, Geoff Pullum, Dave Wilton, Ben Zimmer, and Arnold Zwicky. Some of the entries that I’ve found especially informative or insightful feature:

• five changes to English that were so profound that nobody should even think about complaining about the kind of stuff that they complain about now
• how even though anxious and eager are often used as synonyms, anxiety and eagerness remain strongly differentiated
• a comparison of back in the day and back in my day
• one reason raise the question is not a good substitute for the ignorant often-frowned-upon usage of beg the question
• a smackdown between Bierma and Martha Brockenbraugh, promoter of National Grammar Day and founder of SPOGG (Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar)
• a comparison of Hispanic vs. Latino (a topic often discussed in my family when we lived in El Paso, Texas)
• the demise of I’m all and the hand of I’m like
• a history of I’m good to mean No, thank you
• the semantic shift of journey to be almost always metaphorical
• a debunking of a stupid etymology of lost
• an easy-to-follow introduction to the Northern Cities Vowel Shift
• how pay one’s respects came to so strongly connote visiting a dead person

There is an occasional misstep. For example, in his entry for lay/lie, Bierma points out why it’s so hard to maintain the semantic distinction between them, but missed an opportunity to mention that it’s no coincidence they sound so much alike (since one was a causative form of the other in Old English). At least there was no misinformation in that entry. In the entry on the omissibility of that in relative clauses, Bierma says that as far as he knows, “there’s no clear guideline. It’s a matter of feel.” Well, there are some guidelines. For instance, the that has to stay if it’s serving as the relative clause’s subject (as in the bag that leaked). Worse, Bierma says that that tomorrow things will get better is a relative clause in the sentence I’ll tell him that tomorrow things will get better.

However, such errors and missed opportunities are (mostly) outweighed by Bierma’s modus operandi of “seeking out scholars who might have the information he’s looking for and then actually listening” (as Arnold Zwicky’s blurb puts it). What I found even more distracting was the organization of the book. Unlike a DVD boxed set, the columns in EEE are not arranged in order of publication. That’s not a problem: Chronological order doesn’t suit a format like a weekly column. Instead, as the title suggests, the arrangement is alphabetical, as in an encyclopedia. Unfortunately, this arrangement doesn’t work so well, either. Even though the columns are broken up into bigger and smaller pieces depending on how much Bierma had to say on the various topics in them, many of the entries contain disparate items that (in an alphabetical arrangement) should have been separated. For example, there’s an entry on eon and dilemma. What do these words have in common? Are they part of some idiom? Are they easily confused? Either of those possibilities would have been news to me. Instead, it was just that one Greek reader had asked about them both, as loan words from Greek whose English meaning differed from the Greek. If they had to share an entry, maybe it could have been on Greek loan words. Another example is the entry February and jewelry. They’re together because one of Bierma’s readers vented two peeves in one letter: the pronunciations “Feb-yuary” and “joolery.” Thank goodness for the index.

Other peculiarities arise from the attempt to force a collection of columns into an encyclopedia format. One column was about Erin McKean and her work on the downloadable version of The New Oxford American Dictionary, but instead of just being presented as a (perhaps lightly revised) version of a column Bierma wrote, it’s shoved between entries on diagramming sentences and did you not, and labeled dictionaries, coexistence of handheld technologies. Many times a column that was clearly a book review appears under some heading like this, which can be deceptive. For example, an entry labeled pedantry, history and misguidedness of is really a review of David Crystal’s book The Fight for English: How the Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left. The label led me to expect something more general and inclusive than just what was in Crystal’s book. In fact, this is a complaint about the entire book: Encyclopedia suggests a comprehensive (or at least systematic) survey of some field of knowledge, but EEE actually just covers the topics that Nathan Bierma happened to write about in his column.

In other entries, the attempts to scrub the entries of their dates to make them more timeless seem pointless. When Bierma says, “Here in my hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan, I lined up along the motorcade route to pay my respects as President Gerald Ford’s funeral procession passed by,” why not just say, “In December 2006,” or just give the column’s publication date and go with the more natural “Last week”? The same goes for the book reviews that no longer coincide with the book’s publication, and have to specifically mention the date. Sometimes the scrubbing is incomplete, and deictic references like “this month” survive, hidden in the middle of the entry, as in the entry about Eskimo snow vocabulary.

To some extent, I can understand tinkering with the format of a weekly column before putting it into a book. Jan Freeman tells me that publishers tend to be wary of books that simply collect columns, because reading them one after another can get tiresome. What I think would have done is to divide the book into sections of broad topics: human interest stories about particular languages, word histories, book reviews, language myths, word usage questions. These sections could contain entire columns or just excerpts, as the entries do now; the reviews and human interest would work well as entire columns, while the word usage questions would do better as snippets of the columns that address the particular words.

All that’s not to say that EEE is a bad book. It’s fast, easy, entertaining reading, and would be a good gift for people who like reading about language but may not have heard of Nathan Bierma yet. It’s just not so much a reference book as a language lover’s bathroom reader.

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Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue

“Hey, Doug, listen to this,” I said. “This guy’s writing about how different English is from related languages like German and Swedish. He says:

English’s Germanic relative are like assorted varieties of deer — anteloopes, springboks, kudu, and so on — antlered, fleet-footed, big-brown-eyed variations on a theme. English is some dolphin swooping around underwater, all but hairless, echolocating and holding its breath. Dolphins are mammals like deer: they give birth to live young and are warm-blooded. But clearly the dolphin has strayed from the basic mammalian game plan to an extent that no deer has.

Doug and I were sitting in the front hallway of Adam’s school, waiting for his class to let out. While we waited, I was reading John McWhorter’s Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English. (Not to be confused with Derek Bickerton’s Bastard Tongues; see below.) Now I understand that new FCC rules require me to notify readers when I’m reviewing a piece of blog swag — i.e. free stuff that people from marketing departments send to bloggers in hopes of favorable mentions or reviews. So I’ll say right now that I got this book courtesy of the publicity department at Gotham Books. And to make the existing record clear, I also received free copies of The Unfolding of Language and Forbidden Words, as noted in the reviews I wrote. I also got Grammar Girl’s first book this way, though I didn’t mention this fact in the review. Books that I’ve bought or borrowed myself and reviewed or mentioned include:

• Bastard Tongues
• Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes
• Dreaming in Hindi
• Just a Phrase I’m Going Through
• Biting the Wax Tadpole
• Um
  
• Word Myths
• Eats, Shoots, and Leaves (children’s version)
• The Power of Babel
  

That last one was also by John McWhorter, and I liked it so much that when I was offered a review copy of his latest book, I accepted right away. But, you ask, if I was so eager to read it, why didn’t I lay hands on a copy of it myself last year, when it came out in hardback? The fact is that I just wasn’t terribly interested in reading another history of English. I watched the PBS miniseries on it in the late 1980s; I have my own copy of Baugh and Cable’s history; shoot, one of the things that really got me interested in linguistics was reading the history of English in that World Book Encyclopedia supplement back in high school (which I’ve mentioned once). And if I wanted to read another one, I could borrow my wife’s copy of Bill Bryson’s The Mother Tongue (though I’ve been warned that Bryson’s works tend to contain a lot of errors, and I see this one perpetuates the Eskimo snow-vocabulary fiction in its first chapter). “Untold history?” I thought. “No, it’s been told a lot.” But with a free copy, delivered to me, I figured I couldn’t go wrong.

When I read the first page of the introduction, I suddenly realized that McWhorter really did have a different plan for his story.

Linguistic Memoirs

I’ve been having fun reading books in a recently emerged genre: the linguistic memoir. I’ve already reviewed David Crystal’s contribution. I’ve also read three others, but haven’t had the time to do a proper review of them. Luckily, others have, and I’ve picked out the reviews that reflect how I’ve felt about the books.

The best of the three was Bastard Tongues, in which Derek Bickerton takes the reader to Africa, the Caribbean, South America, and the Pacific as he searches for and analyzes creole languages of the world, showing what they tell us about the nature of language. Almost as interesting as the linguistic discussion are Bickerton’s stories of dealing with academic bureaucracy, working with colleagues and protégés, and hanging out in bars and other seamy places in his research locales. Michael Erard reviews it here.

Not quite as interesting, but still pretty good, was Daniel Everett’s Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes. This is a mixture of memoir not only with linguistics, but with anthropology, as Everett recounts his adventures and lessons learned during his time as a missionary with the Pirahã tribe of Brazil, including how his experiences with them affected his family, and ultimately caused him to question his own Christian beliefs. Although the Pirahã language is discussed throughout the book, the first part of the book is primarily anthropological; the second part lays out how different this language is from other languages, and how (he argues) it poses challenges for Chomskyan linguistic theory. Deborah Cameron reviews it here. I agree with all of what she says except for her ultimate conclusion that they make the book “more frustrating than enlightening”.

The third one, Katherine Russell Rich’s Dreaming in Hindi, is different from the others. She’s not a linguist, but incorporates linguists’ research on second language acquisition as she recounts her year of living in India to learn Hindi. The linguistic parts were very interesting, but the memoir overall dragged so much that I’m still only halfway through it, even though I’ve kept it to the end of the library’s lending period, and will have to return it tomorrow unfinished. It also suffers from the lack of an index — both to revisit the linguistic explanations, and to refresh your memory on characters you’ve forgotten who have reentered the narrative. Katherine Hill reviews it here for Bookforum.com.

David Crystal’s Just a Phrase I’m Going Through

In Just a Phrase I’m Going Through: My Life in Language, David Crystal recounts his development as a linguist, starting with his childhood in a mixed Welsh, English, and Irish community, and ending with his current status as an independent linguistic consultant, public speaker, entrepreneur, and author. In between, he tells about his teen years in Liverpool, his college years at University College in London, his time in the faculty of the University of Reading, his various endeavors in fields of applied linguistics (including teaching English as a foreign language, speech therapy, and helping with the English translations of the Catholic Mass following the Second Vatican Council), his retirement from academe, and his experiences with radio and television.

Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Book

Back in February, I wrote about the podcast Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing. As I noted at the time, Grammar Girl (aka Mignon Fogarty) forgoes the ranting tone often taken by writers on grammar and usage (think James J. Kilpatrick) or punctuation (Lynne Truss), and instead provides friendly and humorous tips and mnemonics to improve your writing. Although Fogarty admits to having grammar peeves, and is sympathetic to the peeves of her listeners, she also says, “I often have to tell people their pet peeves aren’t actually hard-and-fast grammar rules,” and points out that the most fertile ground for grammar peeves is those areas where the rules aren’t so clear-cut.

The podcast has led to the publication of a book by the same name. If you like the podcast, you’ll probably like the book: It consists mostly of material taken from the podcast scripts, though with some material that seems to be new. Better yet, the entries are organized into chapters covering broad topics, which makes it easier to find all the entries on, say, word usage than it is on the website. If you’re unfamiliar with the podcast, you should know that despite her chosen nickname, Fogarty does not restrict her tips to just grammar. In addition to word choice and issues of syntax and word forms, the book covers punctuation, capitalization, online writing, and even how to generate ideas and overcome writer’s block. If it will in some way improve your writing, it’s fair game for Grammar Girl. Nevertheless, this book is not intended for people who make their living as professional writers, and who presumably already have other, more thorough references on their desktops. This is a guide for “everyday writers” who would like to write clearer memos, emails, blog posts, and the like.

It’s a Word! It’s a Phrase! It’s Grammar Girl!

For a while I’d been noticing a podcast called Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips to Clean Up Your Writing when I browsed through the podcasts at iTunes. I never subscribed to it because first of all, I’m pretty comfortable with my grammar, and second, I figured it would be the same old things grammar and writing guides are always telling you: don’t use the passive voice; don’t use hopefully as a sentential adverb; in fact, avoid adverbs wherever possible. But I finally got curious enough to check out a few episodes, and what a surprise! The podcasts present traditional grammar rules, provide nonjudgmental observations of what’s actually happening in the language when the rules don’t reflect common usage, and give practical advice on what to do when faced with these mismatches. Even better, Grammar Girl will get into linguistic topics when doing so will help explain a grammar point. And just a couple of episodes ago, she talked about a linguistic topic apparently just because it was interesting all by itself.

A Book to Sink Your Teeth Into

A few weeks ago my wife caught me reading a book I wasn’t supposed to have. She was hurt. She had thought that out of consideration for her, I would have refrained from buying this material.

Uh Must

I arrived at the agreed-upon location precisely at 10:30. He was waiting for me.

“You got the stuff?” I asked.

He glanced at his shoulder bag but didn’t open it. “Show me the money.”

I handed over a $20 bill, which he pocketed. He reached into his bag, and drew out the package.

Review: Daily French Pod

Every now and then, I feel like brushing up on the French I had in high school and college. About ten years ago, I subscribed to the French version of Reader’s Digest for a year. Years later, I got a copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in French and I have now read almost to the end of chapter one in it. Ah, who am I kidding, using the present perfect tense that way? Let’s be honest: I read almost to the end of chapter one. Oh, and the table of contents, where I was interested to find out that the French word for magic wand is baguette. My trouble when I read things in French is that I keep vacillating between what I want to accomplish. Do I want to read just for the meaning, getting the gist and passing over the words I can’t get from the context? Or do I want to improve my vocabulary, paying special attention to precisely those words? Only for the shortest texts can you try to accomplish both goals, and I don’t have a nice, convenient set of short French texts.

That wasn’t a hint for a Christmas present. I don’t want a nice, convenient set of short French texts, because for the past couple of months I’ve been listening to archived episodes of Daily French Pod.com, “your daily dose of French language as it’s spoken by native speakers.”

Coffee Break Scottish English

If you’re interested in improving your Scottish accent (“and who isn’t?”, I believe it’s customary to say at this point), then don’t pick it up it secondhand from Shrek or Groundskeeper Willie. Instead, learn from actual Scots in a convenient, free, online resource: the weekly podcast of Coffee Break Spanish, “the show which brings you language with your latte.”