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Category: language (page 12 of 22)

Talk the Talk: cougar

21 May 2010 / / 7 Comments

I’m going to start a new tradition for Good Reason readers. As I find the topic for next week’s ‘Talk the Talk’, I’ll post it here, and you can listen for it later on the RTRFM page, if you want to. You’ll probably know something I don’t about this or that topic, so comment away.

For next week, I’m curious about ‘cougars’. Sex & The City star Kim Cattrall just turned down a magazine cover because she would have been asked to pose with a real live cougar.

The actress insists she had nothing against the big cat but doesn’t like the term ‘cougar’ when it’s used to describe an older woman who likes dating much younger men.

She tells U.S. news show Extra, “I was asked recently by a significant magazine for women over 40 to pose with a cougar and I refused to do it because I felt it was insulting and they took away the cover.

“I think that ‘cougar’ has a negative connotation and I don’t see anything negative about… sexuality.”

Do you think ‘cougar’ has a negative connotation? When I hear it, I think ‘aggressively sexy’, two appealing qualities to my view. But I’m not the one being referred to. Anyone else care to comment?

I’ll also be talking about other animal names used to describe people’s sexual categories. If you’re over 40, you’ll remember the days when an attractive girl was a ‘fox’. And we all know about ‘bears‘ — big furry gay guys — but what do you call slightly smaller furry gay guys? Otters, apparently. What other animal terms am I missing?

You can like ‘Talk the Talk’ on Facebook, you know. Just hit the fan page.

Whatever lifts your luggage

12 May 2010 / / 1 Comment

I second Dan Savage’s call to idiom.

Dan Savage dishes out sex advice to troubled souls. His column is not for those easily offended by the variety of human sexual experience. In his latest offering, he touches on the recent outing of noted Christian homophobe George Rekers.

Says Savage:

Rekers is a towering figure in the religious right. He’s the cofounder of the Family Research Council; a member of the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality, a group that claims it can cure homosexuality, and the go-to guy for “expert” testimony about how gay people threaten and endanger children. And last week, Rekers got busted coming back from a 10-day European vacation with a 20-year-old male escort he found on Rentboy.com. Rekers told two reporters from the Miami New Times that he “can’t lift luggage,” so what other choice did he have but to hire a 20-year-old with an eight-inch cock?

To mark the downfall of yet another crazy, hypocritical closet case, I propose that “whatever floats your boat” be immediately permanently retired in favor of “whatever lifts your luggage.” This will be George “Rentboy” Rekers’ legacy, his lexi-colonic gift to the English language. Help spread the meme.

Yessir!

Though credit is also due to Jesus and Mo.

‘Prick’ is no longer offensive

11 May 2010 / / 2 Comments

It’s official.

Australian court clears student on offensive language charge

An Australian student who called a police officer a “prick” has been cleared of verbal abuse charges after a judge ruled that the word was in “common usage” and therefore not offensive.

Henry Grech insulted the senior constable during an argument at a Sydney railway station last year but the offensive language case against him fell apart after the magistrate said the word was in common use.

“I consider the word prick is of a less derogatory nature than other words and it is in common usage in this country,” Robbie Williams, the Waverley Local Court magistrate, told the court on Monday.

It’s not very nice to call a police officer a prick, but if we had a few more test cases like these, it could be useful to linguists in finding out what’s considered offensive and what’s not. What a judge finds offensive may not reflect public opinion perfectly, but it does have the seal of officialdom.

Talk the Talk: Language mixing + Like

2 May 2010 / / Comments Off on Talk the Talk: Language mixing + Like

A couple of new episodes of ‘Talk the Talk’ on RTRFM.

We’ve thrown it open for questions, and here’s the first. It’s about language mixing. What’s the deal with those mixed languages like ‘Franglais’, ‘Chinglish’, ‘Singlish’, and ‘Portugnol’?

Well, some of them are full languages, some are just a general tendency to borrow words, and some are something else.
Check it out here.

I’m on about 5/6ths of the way through the stream. Watch out; it starts playing as soon as the page loads.
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The second episode is about the word ‘like’. Facebook recently changed its rules so that instead of becoming a ‘fan’ of things, you ‘like’ them instead. But what’s behind the word ‘like’? It has a past, you know.

This one is an mp3.

Do you have a question about language that we should address on ‘Talk the Talk’? Well, email the station at

The Pope Song: A linguistic analysis

1 May 2010 / / 5 Comments

Been enjoying this new video from Tim Minchin. It’s catchy, but it does have a wee bit of profanity. Entirely justified.

Here are some stats about the song.

  • some variant of ‘fuck’: 84 times
  • some variant of ‘mother’ + ‘fuck’ in the same word: 35 times
  • some variant of ‘cunt’: 0 times
  • That’s one ‘fuck’ every: 1.54 seconds
  • Ratio of ‘fuck’ words to other words: 1:3.85

Other songs, for comparison:

  • Fuck tha Police by N.W.A.: One ‘fuck’ every 9.32 seconds
  • Too Drunk to Fuck by Dead Kennedys: every 8.89 seconds
  • Fucking in Heaven by Fatboy Slim: every 2.29 seconds
  • Bodies by the Sex Pistols: every 1.0 seconds (but only that one part in the third verse)
  • Fireflies by Owl City: every 0.6 seconds (subliminal)
  • Number of other songs I know that rhyme ‘papist’ and ‘rapist’: 0.

Word of the day: be-clown

27 April 2010 / / 1 Comment

From Ron Rosenbaum’s excellent Slate article: The Tea Party’s Toxic Take on History

I think this is why it bothers me so much when Tea Party ignoramuses put swastikas on their anti-Obama posters. They disgrace themselves, they insult the dead martyrs to the truth, by lumping socialism with fascism and Obama with Hitler. They not only disgrace themselves; they be-clown themselves, they distort the historical consciousness of everyone they spread the comparison to.

That’s the Tea Party to me: an incoherent, jibbering mob of idiots be-clowning themselves.

The use of ‘be-clown’ is relatively new; besides the Rosenbaum article, the word only has a few Google hits from 2008 and 2009. But I think this word could come in mighty handy to describe the ignorant gun-toting racist freaks that currently populate our news cycles.

See, almost exactly two years ago, I predicted that the Obama years would bring a return of 90’s-style conspiracy paranoia. I didn’t foresee the nature of the TP-ers, with their poorly-informed reality-allergic antics, nor did I appreciate the sheer paralysing dumbth of their wingnut queen Sarah Palin. It wasn’t hard to see the 24-hour megaphone of Fox News stirring the pot, but the popularity of Glenn Beck was a bit of a surprise.

Ah, well, it’s tough not being psychic. But even I can tell that there’s going to be a good deal more be-clowning in future.

Sarah Colwill and Foreign Accent Syndrome

23 April 2010 / / 2 Comments

Sarah Colwill is British, but her accent has changed since having a really bad migraine. Usually Foreign Accent Syndrome happens as a result of a stroke. That’s one whomping migraine, I must say. My sympathies.

People identify her accent as Chinese, but I don’t know. I’m leaning toward the idea that it’s not really a complete foreign accent (like you’d get if you were influenced by someone you knew with a foreign accent). I think the syndrome messes with your vowels, people hear you, and then they say, “Gee, you sound ___ (insert name of accent here).”

Here’s a test: If there’s someone in the room with you, play the audio for them, and get them to guess where her accent is from. (They’ll have to guess before the :20 mark because she gives it away then.)

But not only is it messing with her vowels, it also seems to be messing with her morphemes. Notice how she’s dropping endings off words:

And when I did speak, it sound Chinese. That last for about a week. And then I woke up again the next day, it sound more Eastern European. And it have been like that ever since.

I wonder if she was doing that before the migraine.

The saddest thing for me about FAS is how the speaker no longer identifies their voice as their own. Their own voice sounds strange to them.

“The first few weeks of the accent was quite funny but to think I am stuck with this Chinese accent is getting me down. My voice has started to annoy me now. It is not my voice,” added Colwill.

Judi Roberts felt the same way. After her stroke, her American accent changed to what people identified as British. She changed her name to Tiffany Noel, in accordance with her feeling that a part of her had died.

There are worse things that can happen to your brain, of course, but it’s hard to calculate the effect of no longer being able to sound like yourself.

Talk the Talk the Talk the Talk

13 April 2010 / / 1 Comment

Has a month gone by already? I’ve got a backlog on Talk the Talk, so here’s a load of links for your enjoyment and edification.

For the first three links, I’m on about 5/6ths of the way through the stream. Watch out; it starts playing as soon as the page loads.

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23 March 2010: American English

For this episode, I report live from the USA, and fittingly I’m talking about that special dialect known as American English.


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30 March 2010: Guys

Would you call someone a ‘guy’, even if they’re a ‘gal’? What about in mixed-gender groups? A recent article in the Boston Globe is raising issues about what to call people. Is there any better way of handling this in English? And what about other languages?

This time on ‘Talk the Talk’, we return to language and gender, with a look at this most peevish of language peeves.


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6 April 2010: The Munduruku

This week on Talk the Talk, we talk about numbers. In English, we have lots of names for numbers, but the Munduruku people of the Amazon have no words for anything higher than five. Experiments show that they’re good at estimating large numbers like English speakers are, but not so good at working equations using numbers they have no words for. Is it a case of language constraining thought? Or are both being constrained by culture?


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13 April 2010: Homer-nyms

We have the Simpsons to thank for such words as “D’oh” and “embiggen”. But what else do the Simpsons have to tell us about language? On this week’s ‘Talk the Talk’, we look at neologisms and derivational morphology. But don’t worry, I do explain what all that is. I’m also pleased to say that I managed to restrain my urge to overdo the Homer impersonation.

This link seems to be different. They’ve made Talk the Talk downloadable, so now you can take it on your listening device of choice.

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That’s a lot of Talk the Talk to listen to, so don’t overdo it.

For next week’s show, we’re taking your questions, so be sure to email your language questions to talks@rtrfm.com.au, and I might pick it for next time.

Curmudgeonly Scrabble Resistance: enlist now

7 April 2010 / / 8 Comments

Normal people don’t like playing Scrabble with me.

I have all the two-letter words memorised, I’m not bad with my three-letter hooks, and I always have a copy of the OSPD handy during a game. I also have a habit of laying tiles next to other tiles in a tight little bolus, which has the unfortunate effect of locking down the board so tightly that it can’t breathe. But I admit it’s a really unpleasant habit.

The other unpleasant habit I have is making up new words and placing them with confidence. I sometimes have to add, “It’s a word. I am a linguist, you know.”

Sometimes an opponent will complain about the words I use.

“Za? What’s za?” is how it typically begins.

“It’s short for ‘pizza’,” I explain.

“That’s stupid. ‘Za’ isn’t a word, and neither is ‘aa’, which you said was a kind of lava. I’m not going to play if you’re going to use dumb words.”

At this point I calmly remind my friend that we agreed on the OSPD.

“That’s dumb. Who said that those words should be in the OSPD?” says he or she, but usually she.

At this point I give the Every Lexicographer Has to Make Some Tough Choices speech, in my patient linguist voice. It usually doesn’t help, and there is much grumbling.

I tend to resist changes to Scrabble. I was against adding ‘qi’ to the Fourth Edition. I thought it made it too easy to unload the Q. Eventually I got used to it.

But now Mattel has gone too far.

The rules of word game Scrabble are being changed for the first time in its history to allow the use of proper nouns, games company Mattel has said.

Place names, people’s names and company names or brands will now count.

Mattel, which brings out a new version of the game containing amended rules in July, hopes the change will encourage younger people to play.

What, any proper noun? Xerox? Zovirax? Qwyjibo?

This doesn’t seem well-thought out. How can you check if a proper noun is unacceptable?

Mattel said there would be no hard and fast rule over whether a proper noun was correct or not.

I think I’m going to be kicking it Old School on this one. No proper nouns at my place. Or foreign words, abbreviations, or usu. cap.

Daniel font: Words in the clouds

11 March 2010 / / 1 Comment

Word It Out offers a way to make frequency-based word clouds based on word lists or web pages. And they’re using the Daniel font, so you can see your text in my handwriting.

Here’s a word cloud based the words appearing on Good Reason as of yesterday.

"Good Reason"
Click on the link above to see this word cloud at WordItOut. You may also view it on this website if you enable javascript (see your web browser settings).

Word cloud made with WordItOut
Gee, I blog about religion a lot, don’t I?

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