Meesher's Splendidious New Blog

Mr. Puzzled

2007-01-21T11:06:00.000-05:00

I know it's unlikely, because I have 0(zero) readers, but if someone could explain Joe MacLeod's relationship to the City Paper, I'd appreciate it. (And of course, I don't mean YOUR city paper, but the CITY PAPER, the one THEY, (and you know who THEY are) don't want you to know about). Basically, he complains in every other column about how the paper only runs his column every other week, but I also think that he wouldn't want to have to write something every week. So what's the deal? Does Mr. Wrong want to eat that cake he's holding?

Pick teams!

2006-12-13T14:28:00.000-05:00

It's getting increasingly hard to avoid looking at the world as a quatri-polar arrangement, with America, Euro-Canada, China, and India playing the major empires, and introducing a possible Latin American/Arab alliance as the plucky protagonist. Except it's not a movie, and most of the characters have the Bomb.

How strong?

2006-12-12T15:22:00.000-05:00

I'm a Language Log fan, but Roger Shuy's post on the Army's new slogan could use a bit of a lie-down.
"We're strong," the Army is saying.
"Now, just how strong are you, big boy?" ask we, the potential dead soldiers.
"Army strong," the Army confidently responds, flexing its bicep seductively.
Yes, in this context "Army" is an ADVERB, funnily enough, though I suspect some of the brass might be offended by this and demand that it be upgraded to a powerful, manly VERB, or at least to a Lance Verb with the possibility of promotion.

Store-brand fruit sugar punch (definitely not Kool-Aid!)

2006-12-11T21:35:00.000-05:00

If we all join the Barack Obama personality cult (come on everybody, the punch is great!), who will be left to say "I told you so" when he sells our kidneys to Microsoft or bombs Des Moines? I'm not actually suggesting that he would do those things specifically, but it's hard to imagine what could get a president in trouble, considering what they get away with. So if Obama is elected and does slimy Democrat president things just like the slimy Republican presidents have done, remember that I never drank it.

Three seasons, two half-seasons

2006-12-10T12:23:00.000-05:00

This doesn't have much to do with the new interim coach of the US national team (Bob Bradley), but in this article in the LA Times about his appointment, the writer Jim Barrero mentions Juergen "Klinsmann, who coached his native Germany to a surprising third-place finish at last summer's [2006] World Cup." Now, as I write this, 2006 is still straining to hold on by its last greased December, and the same was true for Mr. Barrero (or his editors), if we can believe the date line. We can surmise from this, unless a mistake was made, that in Mr. Barrero's mind a season four months in the past can be referred to as "last," even if it was in the current calendar year.
I hope someone can do an extensive survey on usage of "last," "this," and "next" in the context of seasons, or point me to existing data. Lacking that, I am willing to volunteer my own understanding of the intricacies.
There can be little controversy in referring to the current season. A speaker in June of '06, talking about July '06, will say "this summer." Likewise, he will call August '07 "next summer," and June '05 "last summer." The annually ambiguous season, winter, doesn't even cause a problem when it is in fact winter. Writing at this moment, I feel no qualms about calling December '06-February '07 "this winter," just as December '05 was "last winter" and January '08 will be "next winter."
In my own speech, you will find the same rule for non-current seasons, based on the calendar year, so for me June '05 was "last summer," June '06 is "this summer," and June '07 will be "next summer." If, in December '06, an interlocutor confused my use of "this spring" with spring 2007, which is closer in time, I might clarify it by saying "this PAST spring," but for me that would still mean "this spring" (likewise "the upcoming fall" for "this fall" in January).
The problem with my system is winter, which of course straddles the calendar years. When it is not currently winter, I can only say "the past winter" or "the upcoming winter." I would not know how to interpret "last winter," "this winter," or "next winter" in my own speech, unless it was very close to the season in question (say, in November, in which case "next winter" is actually the winter after next). This might not seem like a problem which needs to be or can be fixed (and changing the New Year is a vain and futile goal), but Mr. Barrero and doubtless many other people seem to have a solution: abandon the adjective "this" for all but the current season; if a season is in the past it is "last;" if it is in the future it is "next," and ignore calendar years.* Also, I cannot ignore the possibility that my own system is the new one and Mr. Barrero's is the original but, having said that, I will ignore it. Tyranny.
Of course, research would have to be done, but I suspect that even for ultras of the Barrero Innovation there is some haziness based on the proximity of the season in question, so that summer 2006 might still be "this summer" in September or May of that year. Maybe this could even lead to some cultural or personality analysis of whether an individual looks to the future or the past. We could imagine a speaker for whom summer 2006 was "last summer" in October of that year but who called the same season "this summer" in April 2006: this speaker might be said to be living in the future (with all sorts of qualifications and hedging etc.).
We can be sure that these conflicting systems, ignored by the schools (maybe they're taught by our parents? lol), have already caused some confusion, since Mr. Barrero and I refer to different historical times (June-August 2006 vs. June-August 2005) with the same words ("last summer"). I have no way of saying, however, if this confusion will simply continue, or if one system or the other will eventually take over.

*[As the title suggests, another possible, if unlikely, solution would be to imagine a calendar year with three normal seasons- spring, summer, and fall- and winter split in two, so that "this winter" spoken in July 2006 would refer to both 1 January - 28(9) February 2006 AND December 2006. This is obviously absurd and would never be used.]

ps. On a related note, why are the solstices and equionoxes at the beginning of the seasons? Along with my dream of pushing New Year's back to the start of spring, I'd like to shift all of the seasons by 1/8 of a year, or about 46 days, so spring, and the New Year, would start between Midwinter and the Spring Equinox, on or around the sixth of February. That in turn would create the "winter problem" with February, straddling as it would two calendar years, so perhaps the first of February would do better.

Balto. Algebra Project

2006-12-08T20:41:00.000-05:00

I am presently giving a belated tip of the hat to the Baltimore Algebra Project (full disclosure: I was a member for several years), who got some alternative weekly ink from the City Paper's Jason Torres for starting a shadow Maryland state school board. Perhaps "shadow" isn't the right word, since the purpose of the State Freedom Board of Ed. isn't just to criticize the more widely recognized board but to replace it. Either way, good luck to them.

Pronoun allsorts

2006-11-29T12:59:00.000-05:00

Today I set about making a list, or rather a set of tables, of the possible personal pronouns in human language. I started with subject pronouns, but these can of course be duplicated for objective, prepositional, disjunctive, and possessive pronouns; and possessive adjectives.
Within each person (first, second, and third), I've made a table with columns representing number (singular or plural) and gender (masculine, feminine, unknown, inanimate, and neutral, or mixed). Also, the first person plural contains both inclusive (we = I + they + you) and exclusive (we = I + they). Some of these pronouns are impossible (first person singular, mixed gender), many do not exist in every language, and most pronouns in real languages cover more than one of these meanings.
A confusion that shows up in English subject pronouns is the case of the third person unknown singular (Apparently this can be called an "epicene pronoun". Whatever.). In normal speech, singular "they" is used. But in formal English grammars "he" is demanded (or he/she or some invented pronoun). This makes me wonder about the status of "one," as in the if/then sentence, "if one wants something done, then he must do it himself." Perhaps someone smarter than myself can work that out.
Even with all of the possibilities I've alluded to so far, there are still plenty of other personal pronouns we could imagine. There could be other numbers, such as the dual or triple. More than that seems unlikely, but that's not what this investigation is about. Why couldn't there be an equivalent to "y'all" for when the speaker is addressing 7 people? There certainly could be.
Also, there is nothing to limit the genders to those I've listed. It seems quite possible that there could be a human language that used a seperate gender for gods, for example. Special genders for fish or eunuchs strike me as less likely, but they could happen.
For a final wrinkle (bored yet?), the first person inclusive plural could have seperate permutations to include all of the second person pronouns that I represent above as "you."

[I'm not going to post my table, mostly because it's sloppily written on the back of a quiz.]

More UK politics

2006-11-28T15:29:00.000-05:00

This time we'll be looking at discrepancies between the transcript of the Prime Minister's Questions and what can be heard in the audio recording of same. I found the transcript from 22 November at a nonpartisan site, theyworkforyou.com, which is linked to by the Prime Minister's official site.
One would expect some changes to be made in the transcript, to convert the standard spoken English used in the debate to the standard written variety, for reasons of vanity, ease of quotation for journalists, comprehensibility, etc. This accounts for the deletion of stutters and corrections (and unimportant speech from the Speaker), expansion of contractions, correction of grammar, and the replacement of some informal constructions with their formal equivalents.
What surprises me is that the names of institutions that the MPs say in full are abbreviated in the transcript (for example, "Health and Safety Executive" to "HSE" at 15'59" in my recording), that speech is included that doesn't show up in the recording (Labour MP Chris Ruane saying "No it has not" when Conservative MP David Jones said that the budget deficit of the North Wales Police had led to 120 civilian staff being sacked) and that perfectly correct and formal wordings are sometimes changed for no reason I can see, as in the example below:

THEYWORKFORYOU.COM TRANSCRIPT:
Tony Blair: Of course, the consultants in the hon. Gentleman's constituency and elsewhere should do what is ethical and what is right for their patients.

AUDIO RECORDING:
Tony Blair: First of all of course the consultants in the honorable Gentleman's constituency and elsewhere should do what is right and what is ethical for their- for- for their patients.

It's fine to delete "first of all," which is one of Blair's characteristic turn-holding phrases (I have no other evidence for this, look it up yourself). It's also fine that the correction of "for their" was cleaned up. But why would "ethical and right" be changed to "right and ethical"? Someone obviously spent some time listening to this; the transcript is much better than subtitle quality. And I would hope the transcript's writer wasn't working from some other text, as that would make the transcript itself pointless. I'm not suggesting foul play, but this and other changes just don't make any sense. I could understand it better if "what is ethical and what is right" was changed to "what is ethical and right," which might seem more formal to some speakers.

Official monster raving endorsement

2006-11-17T20:48:00.000-05:00

I ought to get my political endorsements in soon, before the US midterm election. What, it already happened? Never mind, the primaries are next week. I'm backing the Official Monster Raving Loonies, led by Alan Howling Laud Hope, to somehow take the US presidency and the Supreme Court, so that initialism-over-using (IOU) blogging types will have to call it the OMRLSCOTUS, or something like that. Also, their main policy involves a comprehensive review of headwear, which is something the world really needs.

(That's Official Monster Raving Loony Supreme Court of the United States, of course).