Door #6: Uncommon Consent

Tonight’s session of my social science research methods class covered research ethics: Institutional Review Boards, vulnerable populations, confidentiality, risk/benefit ratios, etc. Although the lecture sparked some lively discussion, the most interesting part of the evening was my teacher’s use of consent as a transitive verb.

Midway through the discussion of informed consent, the professor started a sentence “Before you consent someone…,” meaning, I gather, before you get them to sign an informed consent form.

There was a time when I might have used this as an occasion to rail about the decline and fall of the English language. But now, after a couple of linguistics courses and a lot of time spent reading Language Log, I’m just thrilled that English can still grow and change and surprise me with new meanings and usages.

Lost in Transcription

One of Mark Liberman’s recent language log posts has turned me on to my latest guilty YouTube pleasure: foreign language music videos subtitled with a phonetic transcription of the lyrics that makes some sort of weird sense in another language.

Here for example is the Russian (?) German [so much for my linguistic acuity] group Dschengis Dschinghis Kahn singing their song Moskau, Moskau with the lyrics transcribed into an English-language approximation with lines like “Moscow, Moscow, please respect the caviar!” The “Golden Horde goes to Vegas”-style costumes only add to the appeal.

Liberman’s post contains links to other examples of this emergent video genre, which his informant, Ben Ostrowsky, has christened “Autour-de-mondegreens.” A mondegreen is a misunderstanding of a spoken or sung text. One of the best-known example might be the mishearing of “‘scuse me while I kiss the sky” as “‘scuse me while I kiss this guy.” Note that some of the video links are definitely not work safe.

A pleasant surprise was finding that these sorts of videos have been popular in Sweden where they’re known as “Turkhits.” Swedish Wikipedia provides links to some of the these videos including the most famous, “Hatten är din” (“The Hat is Yours”), a Turkhits version of the Lebanese song “Meen ma Kenty/Habbaytek.”

Wacky Swedish Word of the Day

For the last six months or so, I’ve subscribed to a Swedish mailing list called Om Ett Ord (About a Word). Every weekday, they send me an email describing the etymology of particular word. The editors often pick foreign loan words, which happen to be the same (or almost the same) as the equivalent English loan word, so I end up learning as much about English etymologies as I do about Swedish etymologies.

For instance, did you know that clementines were named after Father Clement, a French missionary in Algeria who discovered a clementine tree growing in his garden? I didn’t either until I read the origin of the Swedish clementin.

I was baffled by today’s entry when I saw the subject line in my in-box:

Toffelhjälte — literally “slipper hero.” (Pronounced tof’-el-yel-tuh, for those of you who don’t speak Swedish. I couldn’t imagine what a slipper hero might be until I read the explanation (here’s my quick and dirty translation):

A toffelhjälte is a man who’s bullied by his wife. Today, the word toffel [slipper] is used, quite simply, to mean the same thing. And not just for married men, but even guys who ignore their friends in favor of the relationship.

The word is used only to describe men. There is no female equivalent. The word was borrowed from the German Pantoffelheld in the end of the 1800s. This usage comes from the expression “unter dem Pantoffel stehen,” to stand under the slipper. Shoes and feet have often been seen as symbols of power and soft shoes as something typically feminine.

Yes, it’s sexist, but nearly as bad as some of the equivalent English expressions.

Sounding Off

Yesterday Mark Liberman at Language Log posted about a Christian Science Monitor article by Matthew Rusling, an American expat living in Japan. Since Rusling picked up Japanese intonation and idioms from his Japanese girlfriend, he unknowingly picked up speech patterns that native listeners interpreted as female.

I had a similar problem the year I lived in Sweden, although I ended up sounding like the someone of a different age, rather than a different gender. Since I was attending classes at a folkhögskola — roughly equivalent to an American community college — I spent a lot of time listening to and talking with people in their late teens and early twenties.

By the end of the year, my Swedish was fluent, but it was fluent teenage-speak, which must have sounded ridiculous coming out of the mouth of a thirty-something woman with a vaguely American accent. Imagine a middle-aged immigrant in this country speaking fluent, American slang with a non-native accent, and you’ll get the idea — something like Dan Akroyd and Steve Martin’s two Czech brothers, the Wild and Crazy Guys of Saturday Night Live fame.

Of course it didn’t help that my classmates were always trying to get me to say things that they knew sounded goofy — either because they knew it was something I couldn’t pronounce quite right or because it was up-to-the-minute hipster slang. Even three years later, some of my Swedish friends will still try to get me to pronounce the words for frogs (grodor) and sprouts (groddar), two pronunciations I have a particularly hard time with.

One last point about Rusling’s original article and some of the responses to the Language Log post. Two other anglophone men mentioned similar problems with learning Japanese. One even concludes “…Just resign yourself to talking like a little girl for the rest of your life and hope to God that no one beats you up.” The underlying message is that, for men, sounding like a woman opens you up to ridicule, if not violence.” Interesting that, apparently even in Japan, the country that brought us the onnagata (male Kabuki actors, often renowned, who play female roles), one of the worst transgressions a man can commit is doing something that might cause him to be mistaken for a woman.

Waiter, Is That a Snowclone in My Sushi?

This morning I clicked on a link to a New York Times article on the effect depletion of tuna fisheries is having on sushi chefs in Japan and elsewhere. Just three paragraphs in I found the following sentence:

From maguro to otoro, the Japanese seem to have almost as many words for tuna and its edible parts as the French have names for cheese.

For those of you unfamiliar with them, snowclones are formulaic clichés of the type “X is the new Y” or “have X, will travel”. Snowclones got their name from the ever-popular discussion of Eskimos and their N words for snow. You can read more (much more) about snowclones and their seemingly infinite permutations on the Language Log blog. The crew of savvy linguists there have popularized the term.

The above example is interesting not only because it doesn’t follow one of the typical formulae like “If Eskimos have N words for snow, then X must have just as many for Y,” but also because the Eskimos and snow have somehow been replaced by the French and cheese.

Apart from the usual facile equation of number of words and cultural importance, the tuna and cheese analogy has another problem. The French, to the best of my knowledge (and I spent a year and a half as a culinary student in Paris), don’t have many words for cheese. They have many kinds of cheese, each with a different name. Drawing a cultural conclusion from this seems a little bit like saying “Boy, Americans must really love their families, each of their relatives has a different name.”

Anyhow, snowclone aside, it was heartening to see this article reach the top of the Times‘s list of most-emailed stories for today. Just last week, in a Salon.com interview, Charles Clover, author of The End of the Line: How Overfishing is Changing the World and What We eat, lamented the lack of media coverage of the depletion of the world’s fisheries.

My inner anthropologist is also interested in the discussion of what happens when reality (environmental reality in this case) forces chefs and consumers to reconsider the nature of sushi, which is arguably not just a food, but a national symbol for Japan.

In addition to Clover’s The End of the Line, I have three other books about sushi and or seafood in Japan on my pile of books to read:

• Theodore Bestor’s Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World
• Trevor Corson’s The Zen of Fish: The Story of Sushi from Samurai to Supermarket
• Sasha Issenberg’s The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy
  

I’ll try to post more after I’ve read these.

Sweden to Phase Out Å, Ä and Ö

In the fine tradition of April Fool’s Day media hoaxes like the hotheaded naked ice borer and the Swiss Spaghetti harvest, The Local, an English-language site with news from Sweden, posted an item about a parliamentary proposal to make the Swedish language more globally competitive by eliminating letters with diacritical marks.

When I clicked on the link to the story from my friend Susan’s post on a Scandinavian music and dance mailing list, I think I actually believed it was on the level, but then I’m not necessarily the best judge.

I not only believed Natural History‘s story about the ice borers, I told my entire family and a number of my friends about it. Fortunately, the whole thing happened before I got tangled up in the Web, so there’s no incriminating email trail my friends can resurrect to remind me how gullible I am.

I’ve bookmarked Slate.com‘s April Fool’s Day Defense Kit — a round-up of some classic media pranks — and set an alarm in my calendar program for next March 30, with a reminder to prepare myself.

Update: And speaking of April Fool’s pranks, I almost forgot to mention my pal Chopper, who temporarily transformed his site Cars! Cars! Cars! (A car blog. Only angrier.) into Krauss! Krauss! Krauss! (An Alison Krauss blog. Only fiddlier.).

Signs of Hope

After a slew of news stories about U.S. states and counties attempting to declare English the one official language within their borders, it was a heartening to read this item from the New Zealand Herald.

The New Zealand government recently voted to add New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) to the country’s list of official languages, along with English and Maori, entitling NZSL speakers to interpreter service in all legal proceedings. They’ve also begun creating teaching materials so that middle and high school students will be able to study NZSL as a second language in public schools.

Parental Metaphors

The year I lived in Sweden the phenomenon of curlingföräldrar — curling parents — was a hot topic in the media.

To understand this expression, it helps to know that the sport of curling is much more popular in Sweden than in the U.S.  You don’t need to be an expert on the sport to get the joke, though.

If you’ve ever seen a clip of a match from the Olympics,  you can probably imagine the way the curlers scrub at the ice with their brooms, clearing a path for the stone. Curling parents are just as intent as they try to smooth the way for their precious offspring.

Ever since I heard about curling parents, I’ve lamented the fact that there was no equivalent expression in English. “Overprotective” isn’t quite the same thing, and “over-involved” isn’t nearly as vivid.

Now, thanks to my college alumni magazine, I can rest easy. The most recent issue features an article on helicopter parents — so-named presumably because of their hovering.

Attack of the Language Cranks

If you follow Language Log at all (and I do), you know that there’s no shortage of language mavens ready to jump on the least usage offense as evidence that the English language is going to hell, with or without handbasket.

Just yesterday, Geoff Pullum posted about software designed to identify all the adverbs in your browser window, presumably so you can go back and strip them from your prose. My favorite bit of Pullum’s post:

Strunk and White were a pair of hypocritical old grousers whose inaccurate grammar and usage edicts dated not from the last century but the one before that. Yet people not only treat them as if their words came from God and had been chiseled into granite slabs during an encounter up a mountain; they also fail to read those words to see if the old fools practice what they preach. Of course they don’t.

(Note that Pullum’s writing doesn’t seem to suffer in the slightest, despite his disdain for the self-styled usage police.)

On some level, I know that it’s not just Anglophones who are obsessed with saving their language from its speakers. Sitting on the shelf alongside my bed is a copy of linguist Fredrik Lindström’s Världens Dåligaste Språk (World’s Baddest Language), which is essentially an extended rebuttal to all the Swedes who think that the standards for Swedish are sinking ever lower and that, by the way, it’s World’s Worst Language, thank you very much.

So I don’t know why I was so surprised this morning when I stumbled on a review (from the Indian newspaper The Hindu) of a new usage manual for Telegu Telugu speakers. All the familiar prescriptivist gripes are present: standards in schools and textbooks are slipping, the media compounds the problem, etc.

School’s out!

At least for the next ten days.

Tonight I had my last class of the semester — finally! — and my first final in 19 years. (Well maybe 12 years, if you count that anatomy class I took during my short-lived “I think I’ll become an acupuncturist” phase.)

Despite much panic over the past few days (especially yesterday night when I found myself uncontrollably surfing the Web instead of studying), all went well. I finished within the time limit. I felt comfortable with all my answers. The test was oddly fun even.

After I turned my exam in to the TA, I felt like skipping around the quad shouting, “I’m done! I’m done.” I restrained myself, though. Such displays might well be considered unseemly at Fancypants U. – at least for forty-year-old returning students. If I were a drunken undergrad, it might be okay.

The oddest thing kept happening as I was writing the answer to the essay questions: I kept almost, not quite writing in Swedish. The same thing happened as I was writing my paper for this class (Intro. to Folklore). That was at least understandable since the paper was actually about something Swedish; it involved reading Swedish books and listening to tapes of people speaking in Swedish.

Maybe it’s just that I was reading a Swedish novel before class started — something to take my mind off the test. Whatever the reason, though, it was nice to have my other language bubbling up unbidden that way.