Wednesday, September 12, 2007

REPEATED WORDS

How often do you find yourself in a situation where you’re writing a letter or article and when you review it, you see you’ve written the same word twice? If you use a word processor, a good one will pick this up and highlight it for you. But how often is it actually correct to use multiple instances of a word?

Over the weekend, my daughter and I were deciding on when to go to the movies. She said she wanted to go to the late show, to which I responded with “Do you want the early late show or the late late show?” For a few moments, we looked at each other wondering if there was anything wrong with either the notion of an “early late” show or even the double-barreled “late late” show. “It’s OK,” I said, “to have ‘early late’ and ‘late late’ so long as we understand that ‘late show’ is actually a single noun meaning ‘a showing that is held in the evening at some indeterminate time, but such that it would not be considered early.’”

Before you stop reading, I should explain that yes, we do talk like that, especially when we’re having breakfast and just “chillin’” or “shooting the breeze” – though how you can shoot a gentle waft of air is probably best left for a future column. The more ridiculous the topic, the more we talk. “Of course,” I continued, “If the late show in question was now no longer in existence, we could have the sentence ‘We used to go to the late late late show,’ because this new use of ‘late’ refers to something now passed on.” This triple play of “lates” got us to thinking about how many such words you could get into a sentence legitimately. Examples such as “Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes!” as said by an excited child who’s just been asked if he wants a trip to Disney or a free bucket of ice cream would be excluded. The sentence has to be coherent and valid.

So we moved on to the notion of a city having a “down town” area. If that area had a region that was depressed and unappealing, you could use the word “down” (as in “I’m feeling a little down today”) as a descriptor. You can thus have a “down down town.” Then, if that city was built on a slope – Seattle, for example – you could conceivably have a physically higher area described as the “up down down town” and a correspondingly lower region called the “down down down town.” Finally, you could use the word “down” again to describe the action of going somewhere, forming the sentence “Let’s go down down down down town.”

At this stage, we were finding it hard to keep up, and as I was writing this article, my word processor was having a real hard time with so many multiples of the same word, drawing many red lines under them screaming “Stop it, that’s not allowed!”

This is not the longest word run of which I am aware. Stephen Pinker, in his book The Language Instinct, gives the following example: “The Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.” Frankly, if you can work this one out, you’re way too smart to be reading this column! But if you can’t, let me know and I’ll end you the reference.

Saturday, September 08, 2007

STUPIDER AND STUPIDER
So who was it that started tossing around the notion that with Age comes Wisdom? The wisest thing I can offer is that as far as I’m concerned, with Age comes Ignorance. Day after day, I am reinforced in my knowledge that in truth, I know very little. And the more I add to my tiny sponge-like brain that soaks up trivia like an Oreo soaks up milk, the less I understand about the world. Sure, I know an awful lot about the tiny piece of the world of linguistics that I use to make a living (I’m a Speech Pathologist by training who specializes in language disorders amongst folks with severe physical disabilities) you could fill a solar system with the stuff I haven’t a clue about.

Take the word apophasis, for example. Doubtless some of you dear readers have heard this word before and can even define what it means. But for me, it is a new one. And that’s all the more depressing for a guy who gets paid for his so-called skills in the English language. Fortunately, I at least have access to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, a two-volume tome that is possibly the most valuable investment I ever made; until I can pluck up the courage – and the cash – to buy the complete Oxford English Dictionary. Wedged between apopetalous and apophlegmatic, both of which are not picked up by my spell checking software, is apophasis, [Late Latin – from the Greek meaning denial] Rhet. A figure in which we feign to deny or pass over what we really say or advise. You may not have known the word itself, but you have doubtless seen it in action.

Politicians in particular seem to be positively apophasic when it comes to talking about their opponents: “I don’t intend to mention Senator Chamber’s seventeen felony convictions because what’s important is how our party intends to deal with crime.” What is also troubling is that while looking up the meaning of this new word, I discovered that I also didn’t know the meaning of the words immediately before and after it in the dictionary. In fact, I had to skip over eight unknown words until I found one that I knew – and that was apoplectic, something I was beginning to feel.

So if I only understand around one out of ten words in the dictionary, and I am supposed to be a linguist, how much more don’t I know about other fields. Physics, chemistry, math, biology, history, geography, football, baseball, boules, and even the plot of Days of our Lives. The more you try to educate yourself, the more stupid you feel.

This realization probably explains how irritated I get with people who claim to know everything about everything. You know the sort – it doesn’t matter what topic you’re discussing, they have something to add. And to make things worse, it isn’t always easy to refute what they are saying because you don’t know. I look back fondly to a conference some years back in Antwerp, where a group of researchers from a UK university did a one-hour presentation on a special software package they had developed that they claimed would make machine-generated language easier. To support their argument, they drew heavily on earlier research carried out by a Professor Van Balcom.

At the end of the presentation, they triumphantly announced, “Any questions?” and scanned the audience. From the back of the room, a portly, bespectacled gentleman stood up and said, “I’m afraid what you’re doing will not work.” Stunned, the lead presenter asked what evidence he had for this statement and the man replied, “Because I am Professor Van Balcom and the reason I stopped working on this line of programming was because it didn’t work.”

If Pride goeth before a fall, then the virtual thunder of researchers hitting the ground was deafening. And schadenfreude is a word that I do know the meaning of.