Blog 9: Language and Society - Jargon

What do these words have in common?
 

Alfalfa	Butcher	Cats	Horse
Bibles	Heralds	Lot	Larry
Jill	Joey	Hey Rube!	Big Bertha
Layout Man	Main Guy	Spec Girl	24-hour-man
Web Girl	Possom Belly	Sky Boards	Jonah’s Luck

 

   jar·gon /järgən/ noun

    Origin

 

Late Middle English (originally in the sense ‘twittering, chattering,’ later ‘gibberish’): from Old French jargoun, of unknown origin. The main modern sense dates from the mid- 17th cent.

 

 

A jargonaut is someone who studies jargon, a term used for “a type of shorthand between members of a particular group of people, often words that are meaningless outside of a certain context” (YourDictionary.com).  There are many types of jargon; business, internet, medical, military, and police to name a few.  Lingo, argot, patter, and vernacular are all synonyms for jargon and some people use the more informal terms of journalese, technobabble, or psychobabble, etc. to refer to the jargon of a specific group. One word that is commonly used to refer to jargon is slang, but there is a distinct difference between the definitions of the two words.  Jargon is refers to technical talk whereas slang refers to informal words. For example what we commonly call a “black eye” would be called a “shiner” in slang and a “bilateral periorbital hematoma” in medical jargon.  Some jargon has escaped the bounds of a particular group and made its way into mainstream vocabulary; think of ‘countdown’ and ‘lift-off’; terms originally used only those employed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) or others in the space industry.

 

 

While researching this topic I found many ‘jargon generator’ websites aimed to assist “in the writing of reports, grant applications, and other documents . . .” as well as several which espouse eliminating jargon including a 2010 TED talk given by Alan Siegel who wants to simplify legal jargon and get rid of the “gobbledygook” and an article by John Preston in the March 26, 2014 edition of the Telegraph, an on-line newspaper in the United Kingdom, which asks, “Speak plainly: are we losing the war against jargon?” For various reasons many people have been trying to eliminate jargon from our language for many years.  From Chaucer who, in the 14^th century, begged the clergy to speak plainly so parishioners could understand what they were saying to Laurence Sterne’s 18^th century parody of the public’s mania for jargon in his book, “Tristam Shandy” to the books of Sir Ernest Gowers’ in the 20^th century.  Sir Gowers said he felt jargon was “impossible to understand . . . [and] it demeaned people by making them feel stupid.”  His books “Plain Words” (1948), "An ABC of Plain Words" (1951), and "The Complete Plain Words" (1954) have consistently sold out and gone through many reprints.  Believing that jargon is steadily taking over the world, Gowers’ great-granddaughter has updated and republished “Plain Words.”  The article also cites a real-world example which I think everyone can relate to; in 2005, after the bombings in London, the local coroner discovered that there had been delays in some of the victims receiving care because people working for different emergency services had been unable to understand the other’s jargon.  Unfortunately, rather than eliminate the unnecessary jargon, the response of the agencies was to create an “Emergency Responder Interoperability Lexicon.”

 

 

What do these words have in common? Answer

Resources

http://examples.yourdictionary.com/examples-of-jargon.html

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/

http://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/jargon

http://www2.uncp.edu/home/canada/work/allam/1914-/language/jargon.htm

 

 

Blog 8: Language Acquisition

 

“The first language we learn influences our perception of everything we hear later.”

 

Credit: Design by Alex Jeon, National Science Foundation

 

“Language Learning”, an article by Nicole Mahoney found on the National Science Foundation website, states that while there are many unanswered questions about the acquisition of language, one question not open for debate is that “language acquisition is a complex process.”

Most researchers agree that it involves a relationship between biology and environmental factors; the challenge is to figure out they converge to influence language learning.  Noam Chomsky is famous for his ‘theory of universal grammar” which states that all languages have the same basic structural foundation and this is what makes it possible for a child to become fluent in any language during the first few years of life.  However, not all linguistics are proponents of the theory and they “place greater emphasis on the influence of usage and experience when it comes to language acquisition.”

The article ends by stating that more research is needed; we still don’t know why language disorders occur, what happens when a stroke or Alzheimer’s erases a person’s knowledge of language, or how some people learn a second language.

The article itself is quite brief, but the webpage has sidebars with information on research being done on how babies make sense of what they hear and the emergence of Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL).  Other tabs regarding ‘Language and Linguistics’ include ‘Speech is Physical and Mental’ which discusses the anatomy of language; how sounds begin as breath is expelled from the lungs and the air vibrates the vocal chords on its way to the mouth.  The sound waves enter the listener’s ears and the words are analyzed by the brain.  Research has shown that our experiences with language can also alter the brain and shape how it functions.  This page has links to more information such as ‘The Brain As Controller’, ‘Hearing Mechanisms’, and ‘Speech Production’.  Several pages have options to click on audio; at ‘Paths of Change’ I learned that there was a Great Vowel Shift (GVS) in English during the 15^th century and you can hear the difference in how vowels were pronounced in Middle English, the Mid-Shift, and how they are pronounced today.  The site contains several tabs with articles written by different authors, all are equally fascinating.

Language Learning


Blog 7: Moribund Languages

If I forget my native speech,
And the songs that my people sing
What use are my eyes and ears?
What use is my mouth?

If I forget the smell of the earth
And do not serve it well
What use are my hands?
Why am I living in the world?

How can I believe the foolish idea
That my language is weak and poor
If my mother’s last words
Were in Evenki?

Evenki poet, Alitet Nemtushkin

According to K. David Harrison, author of “The Last Speakers: The Quest to Save the World’s Most Endangered Languages”, a moribund language is, “A language that will most certainly become extinct in the near future because no children speak it as their first language.”

 

David, and fellow curator, Marjorie Hunt can be seen in this video from the 2013 Smithsonian Institute's "One World, Many Voices: Endangered Languages and Cultural Heritage" Festival.

One World, Many Voices

It is estimated that two languages die out every month and of the 7,000 languages in the world today, more than half are expected to die within the next century.  Languages become extinct most commonly because bilingual speakers shift from using one language to the socially dominant language.  However, we lose languages in other ways as well;

·       Genocide causes a radical language death - when a large ethnic group is massacred, the remaining language speakers stop using the language for fear of also being killed.

·       Disease

·       Natural disaster

·       Gradually through neglect

·       Displacement

·       Education – schools insist that the children of immigrants learn to speak the official language of the country

·       Geographic isolation

·       Urbanization

·       Globalization

·       Technology

·       No written form of the language

Click here to view more information about the festival and to see an endangered languages story map.

One World, Many Voices: Endangered Languages and Cultural Heritage Festival 2013

Linguist and professor at MIT, Kenneth Hale, who is reported to have been able to converse in 50 languages, eloquently expressed the damage done to all of us when a language is lost;

"When you lose a language, a large part of the culture goes, too, because much of that culture is encoded in the language. Language is much more than grammar and is often inseparable from the intellectual productions of its speakers, such as some forms of verbal art (e.g., verse, song, and chant).  When you lose a language, you lose a culture, intellectual wealth, a work of art. It's like dropping a bomb on a museum, the Louvre.”

Additional resources used

http://cr.middlebury.edu/public/usoltan/intd0111a-f06-html/content/language_death.pdf

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2001/hale.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/yourvoice/language_ecology2.shtml
http://www.gial.edu/images/theses/Chang_Debbie-thesis.pdf
http://www.pbs.org/pov/tailenders/special_languages.php
 

 

 

 

Blog 6: "Count the Superfluous Redundant Pleonastic Tautologies"

 

www.thegreatdeejays.com

George Carlin was more than a comedian, he was a master wordsmith.  Here's an essay he wrote on tautologies, the saying of the same thing twice in different words.

“My fellow countrymen, I speak to you as coequals, knowing you are deserving of the honest truth. And let me warn you in advance, my subject matter con­cerns a serious crisis caused by an event in my past history: the execution-style killing of a security guard on a delivery truck. At that particular point in time, I found myself in a deep depression, making mental errors which seemed as though they might threaten my future plans. I am not over-exaggerating.

I needed a new beginning, so I decided to pay a social visit to a personal friend with whom I share the same mutual objectives and who is one of the most unique individuals I have ever personally met. The end result was an un­expected surprise. When I reiterated again to her the fact that I needed a fresh start, she said I was exactly right; and, as an added plus, she came up with a fi­nal solution that was absolutely perfect.

Based on her past experience, she felt we needed to join together in a com­mon bond for a combined total of twenty-four hours a day, in order to find some new initiatives. What a novel innovation! And, as an extra bonus, she presented me with the free gift of a tuna fish. Right away I noticed an immedi­ate positive improvement. And although my recovery is not totally complete, the sum total is I feel much better now knowing I am not uniquely alone.”

Behind Carlin's comic observations lay the sharp linguistic insights of a self-described "disappointed idealist."

"Question everything you read or hear or see or are told," he recommended in a 2004 CNN interview. "Question it. And try to see the world for what it actually is, as opposed to what someone or some company or some organization or some government is trying to represent it as, or present it as, however they've mislabeled it or dressed it up or told you."

Now that Carlin has passed on, kicked off, checked out, made his exit, gone to glory, cashed in his chips, and joined the great majority to sleep the big sleep, we wouldn't dare say nice things about him. It's too late for that.

Count the Superfluous Redundant Pleonastic Tautologies

 

Precocious Readers - Blog 5

www.parent.com

My daughter, now a junior in college, taught herself to read before she was 3 years old.  Born the month before I turned 35, she was a much longed-for and awaited child; I loved being a stay-at-home mom and seeing the world through her eyes.  I like to talk, as anyone who knows me will confirm, and she became my audience during the long hours her dad, a sergeant in the Army, was at work or deployed.  When grocery shopping I would ask her if she would rather have the green broccoli or the yellow corn; never mind that she was 3 months old and couldn't answer! 




Roger B. Francis branch library
 http://sjcpl.lib.in.us/rbf/
 

Reading is one of my greatest pleasures and I read to her from the time she was 5 months old and could sit on my lap, held steady between my arms.  We started going to the Roger B. Francis branch library in South Bend, Indiana, once a week for "Lapsit" story-time when she turned 15-months; the youngest age they would allow children to attend.  After story-time we would go over to the children's section, plant ourselves on the floor, and spend upwards of an hour looking at the books and making our choices as to which ones to check out; usually 20 at a time.  It was during one of these book "banquets", just before she turned 3 years old, that I discovered she could read. She was sitting on the floor next to me, looking through a book I knew for a fact she had never seen before, let alone looked through or that I had read to her, and she started reading it aloud.  It was a kindergarten-level storybook and she only stumbled over a couple of hard words like zucchini!  I was absolutely amazed. 

She hadn't spoken any earlier than any other child I knew, but once she started talking, her vocabulary had seemed to grow exponentially.  I had kept a list on the cupboard door of the new words she said every day so I could share it with her dad when he got home, but after a week or so I gave up, I was spending too much time running to the kitchen.  Needless to say, I was wondering how she had done it!  While I had been reading to her for several years, and she had been attending story-time, I had never attempted to "teach" her to read.  There was one instance, on one day, with one page of one book that I had pointed to the words as I was reading them, to show her the
correlation between the two, so that she would know that the book was "telling" me what to say.   However, as soon as the thought popped into my head I realized it might be too much; she was too little, she had plenty of time to learn to read, don't turn it into a lesson, don't make it "work", keep it fun, so I pulled my finger back.  After thinking for a few days about how it may have happened, I realized it was probably the "Wee Sing" books and tapes I kept in the car. 

http://singbookswithemily.wordpress.com

From the day we brought her home from the hospital she hated her car seat.  I don't know why, it was brand-new, it had lots of soft padding, the fabric was warm in the winter and cool in the summer.  I tried various toys to distract her, but none of them worked for more than a few minutes.  Then I remembered the Wee Sing Nursery Rhymes and Lullabies book and tape I had gotten when she was just a couple of weeks old.  I only knew 2 or 3 lullabies at the time, but because I cannot read music, nor sing well for that matter, the lullaby books I had found were useless to me.  Until, that is, I found "Wee Sing", it had the book so I could learn the words and the tape so I could try and approximate how the song should sound - wonderful!  I liked it so much that several months later I picked up "Nursery Rhymes and FingerPlays"; I kept the tape in the car and we would sing along when we were out on our errands.  One day, when she was about 18-months old and being particularly crabby about her car seat, I turned the book to the page with the song we were listening to, handed her the book and pointed to that song on the page.  It was just to distract her, to give her something to keep her busy. I thought she'd turn the pages, and not finding very many pictures, within 5 minutes she'd either hand it back or throw it on the floor of the car.  She didn't - she loved it and she seemed to know when to turn the pages even though there was no sign given when it was time to do so.  We went on to get many more "Wee Sing" books and tapes; Silly Songs, America, Campfire Songs, and Dinosaurs, to name a few. 

I firmly believe that because she could see and hear the word at the same time the concept of reading "clicked" for her.  Add to that the fact that she listened to the songs over and over while in the car where there were no distractions.  But all I have is a mother's intuition, I wanted proof.  Therefore, in order to create this blog, I had to work backward.  I wanted to write about how a child for all intents and purposes taught herself to read; I started with the hypothesis and did research looking for my proof. I have spent hours looking for articles, hoping to find something scientific that would explain how it happened, what connections in the brain made it possible to happen?  I found several articles about hyperlexia, but my daughter does not have some of the other symptoms such as sensory integration dysfunction, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (adhd) , motor dyspraxia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression and/or seizure disorder.  Additionally, I found a great many blogs by parents and teachers about precocious readers they know or have known and many, many sites where one can learn "how to create" a precocious reader.  However, I found only one that addresses the scientific aspect; Reading with Young Children, a report published by the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented.  Authors, Drs. Nancy Jackson and Cathy Roller, state, "Literacy development begins very early as the 2- or 3-year-old child acquires a broad base of knowledge and skills in the context of a wide range of activities and experiences. Learning to identify and print letters and words are important parts of beginning to read and write, but early literacy development also encompasses learning about the nature of stories, the characteristics and functions of print, and the sound patterns of oral language.''  However, they conclude with, "The reasons why some children become precocious readers are not well understood."

So, even though I'm no further ahead in understanding how it happened I sure had fun doing the research!







 

Mondegreens, Eggcorns, and Malapropisms - Blog 4

Book cover courtesy of www.amazon.com

I first read this book with my daughter when she was 4 or 5 years old.  It's about a little girl named Sage who is home sick from school and calls her friend to get the list of spelling words the teacher had given out that day.  The result is hysterical, both my daughter and I loved the book; I even used it several years later as a lesson plan when we were homeschooling.

Our recent classroom discussion about Wernicke's aphasia got me thinking again about how we sometimes use words totally out of context either because we've misheard or misinterpreted the original word.  For example, we all know about the version of the Pledge of Allegiance in which “I led the pigeons to the flag” is recited instead of “I pledge allegiance to the flag.”  Well it turns out there is a word for this phenomena.  It’s called a mondegreen. 

According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, a mondegreen is a word or phrase that results from a mishearing of something said or sung; for example, “very close veins” is a mondegreen for “varicose veins”.  Mondegreens are a sort of aural malapropism, instead of saying the wrong word, you hear the wrong word.  Some other examples are “sleep in heavenly peas” instead of “sleep in heavenly peace”; “Olive, the other reindeer” instead of “all of the other reindeer”; and “sweet dreams are made of cheese” instead of “sweet dreams are made of this.”  (You can find links at the end of the article to some websites with more mondegreens, etc.)

I was curious to find out if there was a relationship to a particular function of the brain (or malfunction) related to the use of mondegreens, malapropisms, and other misperceptions of speech.  Sadly, according to an article published January 8, 2014, by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, no scientific studies to date have been conducted to examine this phenomenon.  The article, “Mondegreens and Soramimi as a Method to Induce Misperceptions of Speech Content – Influence of Familiarity, Wittiness, and Language Competence” is the proposal to study language processing using mondegreens and Soramimi which are “a valuable tool to induce plasticity within the auditory system.”  There also seems to be a connection to a theory by Hermann von Helmholtz regarding the physiology of perception which basically states that the eye is relatively poorly made, optically speaking, and that our vision is a result of making assumptions and conclusions from incomplete data, based on previous experiences.  The authors of the study hypothesize that what we hear is sometimes a result of making assumptions and conclusions from incomplete data, based on previous experiences and thus our perception of the word could affect the way it is heard.

Glossary

Eggcorn - a term, coined in 2003, from an on-line discussion about a woman who misheard the word acorn as eggcorn.  Eggcorns differ from mondegreens because while the swapped words sound the same and the listener makes a connection in meaning it doesn’t create a new meaning.  Examples of eggcorns are “chomping at the bit” instead of “champing at the bit” and “mute point” instead of “moot point”.

Malapropism - an unintentionally humorous misuse or distortion of a word or phrase.  Yogi Berra, legendary baseball player, manager, and coach, was famous for his malapropisms including, “It’s like déjà vu all over again”.

Mondegreen – a word or phrase that results from a mishearing of something said or sung. 

Soramimi – a Japanese word whose literal meaning is ‘fancy hearing.’  Usually refers to musical lyrics that are misheard as nonsensical Japanese.

Miss Alaineus - Author Debra Frasier's website

Mondegreens and Soramimi - a study

Mondegreens

More Mondegreens

Eggcorns













 


 

Hand signals help restaurant servers communicate - Blog 3

Who wouldn’t like to dine in a restaurant without being asked what they’d like to drink by three different people or have the chef personally congratulate them on a birthday or anniversary.  As an employee wouldn’t it be wonderful to know before you get to the table whether the guest wants still or sparkling water thereby saving steps which saves time which I can give back to the guest.

Still water - hand held horizontally

We don’t know when restaurants starting using this silent communication, but we know it was in use in 1944 when a photo spread in Life magazine revealed how Sherman Billingsley, the owner of the legendary Stork Club in New York, let his staff know, without saying a word, that he wanted to pick up someone’s check by playing with the knot in his tie or get away from a customer by tugging on his ear.

While written communication and wordless communication are the most reliable forms of communication in a noisy restaurant, wordless communication is by far the easiest and fastest for the staff. For the guest, use of wordless communication provides them with a seamless dining experience, things seem to happen almost magically. 

 “Most communication is non-verbal,” says William Washington, general manager of Le Diplomate in Logan Circle, where a forward palm from a supervisor triggers a server to refresh an empty bread basket. “Everybody does it to a certain extent” in the restaurant trade.

And signals can work both ways; diners around the world know that scribbling in the air is likely to get them their check and swirling an empty water glass typically results in a refill.   Missed signals are an occasional occupational hazard. One restaurant manager, who doesn’t wear a tie clip, is frequently adjusting the neckwear on his chest causing his teammates to ask, “What do you need?”

Because non-verbal communication was the first form of communication, the first form of language, I thought it might be fun to take a look at non-verbal communicate used in an innovative way.  According to Merriam-Webster.com, language is “a systematic means of communicating ideas or feelings by the use of conventionalized signs, sounds, gestures, or marks having understood meanings.”  I think it’s interesting to note that non-verbal gestures in different cultures have different meaning, just a different languages use different words to mean the same thing.  Did you know that using your forefinger and thumb to make the “ok” sign is considered vulgar in Brazil and Russia?  Or a thumbs up to signal “good job” is offensive in West Africa?  But that’s the subject of another blog! 

Hand gestures - video

 

Complete Washington Post article