The Growlery

Language and Societies abstracts, vol. 5 (2013)

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 13:10:54 GMT

The students in the 2013 edition of my Language and Societies course are extremely proud to present abstracts of their research papers which they have been working on for the past three months, published at our course blog of the same name. As has become an annual tradition, I am sharing this work with a broader audience. I invite you to take a few minutes to look at the abstracts of interest to you, and to offer comments and questions, especially at this critical juncture over the next week, when the authors are making final revisions to their papers. Thanks!

Heather Buza: An Analysis of Driving Contracts for Persons with Dementia

Darlene Pennington-Johnson: The Verbal Art of Bribery: Going Further than Detroit’s Front Door

Stephen Teran: Aviation English and Communication Problems

Hind Ababtain: Saudi Arabic Diglossia and Code-Switching in Twitter: Education and Gender Effect

Kaitlin Muklewicz: Physician communication with women who have multiple sclerosis

Jennifer O'Hare: Irish or English? An Irish Parent’s Decision about a Child’s Education

Michael Thomas: Fixing and Fixing: Literal Language and Perceptual Relevance in High-Functioning Autism and the Less Wrong Community

Georgia Diamantopoulos: The Linguistic Expression of a Greek-American Identity

Kelsey Garason: Exploring Language and Gender through Blood and Combat

Brenna Moloney: The Dialectics of Pronoun Use in Modern Russia

Elspeth Geiger: Anishinaabemowin Animacy: The Metalinguistic Beliefs in Language Revitalization Websites

Jeri L. Pajor: Can Sacred Spaces Reveal Clues to Wyandotte’s German Ethnic Heritage and Show Status?

C.A. Donnelly: I Want to Convince You to Believe: Discourse and Authority in the Moon Landing Hoax Conspiracy Theory

Kelly A. Johnston: The Invisible Majority: Language as a Means of Education in the Context of a German-American Historic House Museum

Talia Gordon: Beyond the Board: Metalinguistic Awareness and Language Beliefs Among Expert Scrabble Players

Leah Esslinger: Greeting Patterns in Midtown Detroit

Kimberly Anne Shay: Indigenous Language and Assimilation: Navajo and the Workplace

Sarah Carson: Black Nerds in the Media: A Linguistic Analysis

Monica Mieczkowski: “She may have wanted it”: Discourse of Consent in Online Accounts of the Steubenville, Ohio Rape

Julie Haase: Judging a Wine (Or Winery) by its Label

Kimberly A. Compton: A Community of Practice and Constructing Children’s Agency

Katherine Korth: AKC: Ravelry’s Impact on the Language of Knitters

Tiny editor

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 04:17:04 GMT

(in case you're still reading ... you are, aren't you?)

This evening, after Arthur and I were working on binary and hexadecimal numerals (yes, yes, I know, nerd alert), he wanted to know if there were any other ways of writing numbers. So of course I told him that I wrote a book on the subject. That was where my trouble began. Then he asked how many books I've written, and I told him: just the one, but I have another one coming out soon. So naturally, he asked me how long it was, and I told him, about 300 pages, to which he replied, "Well, I can see why you aren't done it yet, then!" Hmph. And then he wanted to know my publication plans for the next several books after that. What will the next one be? Well, I wasn't sure, but I thought it might be on my stop signs research (for which he has been my field research 'assistant' in the past), but he remarked skeptically, "Why would anyone care about that and why would it be a good book?" Fair enough, I suppose. I probably should be able to answer that question. He then wanted to know about the next one, and I told him it might be about my Math Corps research. He looked at me and then said seriously, "Your first book was pretty good. It was about a specific subject in math. So you should do that again." Then he suggested that maybe what I need to do is to publish a 'special edition' of my first book, with 15% new material so we can just put a sticker on the cover. I told him that I already put everything I knew about numerical notation in the first edition. He suggested that that was a mistake. So there.

On the plus side, when I showed him his name in the acknowledgements of Numerical Notation, where I wrote, "Arthur Chrisomalis provided useful firsthand insights into the childhood acquisition of lexical and graphic numeration,
and rekindled his father’s wonderment at the magic of numbers," he gave me a big hug and told me he loved me. Awwww. Then, for his bedtime story tonight, he asked me to read to him from Numerical Notation, which of course I did, and he even laughed at the joke on page 2 (where I give as an example of ordination the list, "1. Wash dishes, 2. Sweep floor, 3. Finish manuscript"). However, after reading a long and dense paragraph I turned to him and asked, "Did you understand any of that?", to which he replied, "I wasn't really paying attention to half of it." So, I'll count that as a half-win.

"Vote your conscience"

Sat, 03 Nov 2012 00:35:23 GMT

"Vote your conscience" - in Canada, it used to be practically the slogan for the NDP. And you hear it trotted out in American politics around election time as various minor parties aim to pick off a percent or two from the Democrats or Republicans in some state or another. The problem with the sentiment as expressed is that "vote your conscience" is implicitly, pragmatically placed in contrast with something else. But what is that thing? Voting against one's conscience? Voting without a conscience? Implicitly, the sense is that voting for the lesser of two evils, or pragmatically, is either amoral at best, immoral at worst. That either you vote according to some pristine ideal, or else you are a spineless, unprincipled voter blowing with the winds of popularity. And to choose to vote your conscience, even when that would help bring about the least desirable of several possible outcomes, is somehow a nobler and more moral action than the alternatives. Nonsense. Every vote is a vote of conscience. Of course, voting for the party or candidate that, in some ideal world, most closely approximates the positions you agree with most fully, can be a reasonable choice. Of course radical leftists in Wyoming should vote for Jill Stein and conservative libertarians in New York should vote for Gary Johnson. Or whatever. But conscience does not exist in a vacuum, absent the consequences of the choices that it motivates. To vote for a flawed candidate, where it might really make a difference and prevent your least preferred candidate from winning, is a moral decision. It involves your conscience in a fundamental way, as you look, as a voter, at all of the potential consequences and work to avoid the worst-case scenario. So, to my American friends, when you go to vote on Tuesday (if you have not voted already), please do cast a vote of conscience, by reflecting consciously on the outcomes you can produce.

9/26 report, 2012 edition

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 21:14:30 GMT

Every year for the past several years I've been tracking the number of jobs listed on the American Anthropological Association job postings as of September 26. That date is somewhat arbitrary and I chose it for historical reasons, but a slightly different date wouldn't really change much when what I'm looking at is the overall trend, year-over-year. As a proxy for the health of the job market in anthropology, though, the AAA listings are ideal, since, at least historically, virtually every tenure-stream position in the discipline gets listed there (but see below). So here we have it, including the 2012 figure:

2006: 190
2007: 186
2008: 168
2009: 78
2010: 112
2011: 117
2012: 109

While this looks like a slight decrease from last year, I actually think that actually there are around the same number of jobs, or possibly even trending slightly up, for three reasons:

First, there are definitely fewer postdocs or nationally-advertised one-year positions listed on the AAA site than in the past. In the past, upwards of 20% of jobs posted were postdocs or visiting positions or jobs outside the academy; this year, fewer than 10% of the posted jobs are non-tenure-track. So that's a good sign just in general (though it makes me wonder where all the postdocs have gone).

Second, I've noticed a lot more institutions posting tenure-track anthropology jobs on more general sites (like the Chronicle of Higher Ed or Inside Higher Ed) rather than the AAA. One possibility is that this may reflect a decline in the AAA's prestige, but I don't think that's too likely. Alternately, I've heard that the their AAA's job listings are quite pricey, so maybe they're just getting priced out of the market in an era when deans are more reluctant in the past to allow big budgets for job searches.

Third, my sense (anecdotal, admittedly) is that while formerly many if not most jobs were posted in September, now lots of tenure-track positions get posted in October or later. This may partly be because deans/provosts don't approve searches as early, although I've heard that jobs in English lit are decidedly up already by this point, which would work against that idea. More significantly, anthropology departments are definitelyl less likely in the past to interview candidates at the November annual meetings (relying on Skype or phone interviews instead), because of the cost of national searches and the ease of video interview. Thus, positions can be advertised later and with a later closing date. This will be confirmed or refuted within a few weeks as we see how many new postings come in October.

A puzzle and an error

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 03:46:33 GMT

Today, Arthur and I finished his first 'real' (i.e. not toddler-oriented) jigsaw puzzle, a map of Canada. He got the puzzling bug while we were up visiting a friend's cottage this summer and they had a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle of Michigan and its tourist sights, which he worked on for quite a while, but really couldn't come close to finishing. So I picked this one up at Zellers super-cheap as they are going out of business and had everything on deep discount. And after about seven or eight evenings of work on it, we got it done:

Unfortunately, despite the puzzle being perfect in lots of ways (it's educational, it's complex enough but not ridiculous, it was cheap as hell), it has one small flaw, but one that is particularly galling to me. Those astute in the ways of Canadian geography will spot it:

Well, you can't have everything. Anyway, Arthur is now ready to take on a bigger challenge.

Pausodonoptic

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 02:36:45 GMT

A correspondent to the Phrontistery yesterday posed a very interesting riddle:

I was in a pub the other day and saw a barometer on the wall. It was old and has the word pausodonoptic on it. I had never heard of this before and was curious so I did a bit of searching online. I didn't really find any definition of the word anywhere. I was disappointed that I couldn't find it on your site either. Have you any idea what it means? I shall look forward to hearing back from you.

I get plenty of these from my dutiful readers, and most of them are easily handled, but this one is a real puzzle: pausodonoptic is not in any of the usual online dictionaries, nor is it in the OED. The correspondent sent a photo of the object, so the spelling is correct. While there are a couple dozen websites that use the word, applied to various items (spectacles, barometers, cameras), but none that give a real sense of what it is supposed to mean. So, a mystery - but one that I was eventually able to solve (I think). My response:

You're quite right that 'pausodonoptic' is not used in context anywhere on the web, and indeed, nothing like it is found in the mammoth Oxford English Dictionary. This suggests that it is a coinage used by a manufacturer for the purposes of advertising some feature of the device. Now, 'pausodontic' looks as if it must be Greek-derived, so I turned to the Liddell and Scott classical Greek lexicon. There I looked for words starting with 'pauso-' and found pausodunos 'soothing pain'. This could then combine (a little improperly, and changing the final 'u' to 'o'), with -optic to mean something like 'soothing pain of the eyes', or in other words, relieving eye strain or pain. I was still a little confused, because this doesn't seem to be a suitable characteristic for a barometer. However, looking at the range of products called 'pausodonoptic' using a Google search, I note that there is a pausodonoptic camera and pausodonoptic spectacles. One advertisement from 1890 even says "You will act with discretion if you buy the New Pausodonoptic Spectacles or Eye-Glasses, (convex or concave), so comfortable and cooling to the eyes. They will enable you to read or sew, especially at night, with positive pleasure when others fail." The photo you sent afterwards, with the maker indicated as an optician, confirms this idea. My guess, then, is that the glass used in the barometer must be somehow specially treated in the same way, perhaps to reduce glare. Whether any of the buyers could figure out, or cared about, the Greek-derived coinage is unknown, but manufacturers both then and now often give scientific-sounding names to their products to enhance the sense that they must be effective.

So, what do you think of my explanation? Anyone have any alternate suggestions?

Four by four

Sun, 17 Jun 2012 04:19:36 GMT

Heading to Montreal tomorrow - leaving Julia and Arthur behind this trip, with Grammie on hand to help out. Four hours of driving tomorrow to see my parents and especially my grandmother, who just moved into assisted living this week and is feeling pretty vulnerable, I think. Four hours of driving on Monday to get to Montreal, possibly to hang out with people but with no firm plans. Attend my doctoral student's defense on Tuesday (which is a story in itself, how I came to be the co-supervisor of a McGill doctoral student) and then four hours of driving to get back to Cobourg. Then four hours of driving on Wednesday morning to get back home, collapse, and get ready for the onslaught of things here. I suppose the only saving grace is that the trip is paid for (mostly). But still.

Language and Societies abstracts

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 14:46:56 GMT

Once again, the students in my senior / graduate linguistic anthropology course, Language and Societies, have written abstracts of their research papers, which I have now posted on the course blog of the same name. As always, I am casting a wide net, looking for comments from anyone interested in these subjects. If you have a few spare minutes, I'd really appreciate if you could take a few moments to post a comment on one or a few abstracts that interest you. I am extremely pleased in general with the quality of insight and analysis, and I am confident that several of these papers will eventually end up as conference presentations. Thanks!

Siobhan Gregory: “Detroit is a Blank Slate”: Metaphors in the Journalistic Discourse of Art and Entrepreneurship in the City of Detroit

Stephanie Nava: Language Loss and Maintenance in the United States: An Examination of Mexican and Japanese Immigrants and their Kin

Scott Shell: The Conversion of Scandinavia by Means of Script Transition

Sean Shadaia: Analyzing medical discourse through the lens of the non-English-speaking patient / interpreter / physician interaction

Lauren Powers: Hip-Hop Lyrics and the Defaming of Women in Hip-Hop Culture

Wendy D. Bartlo: Elderspeak: an examination of language directed at older adults

Alex Beaudin: 140 Characters

Amelia Baumgarten: “Okay, at this point you’re abusing sarcasm”: Figurative language and negative emotion in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Sophocles Sapounas: A contemporary cross-cultural study of politeness: The universal necessity of politeness in human interaction

Nadia Maraachli: Death-related discourse in assisted living facilities

Jennifer Schechter: Grammar Nazis, prescriptivism, and snobs, oh my! Social standards and spoken language

Colleen Face: Queer Russian intersectionality

Robert A. Johnson: “Frugal or spendy?”: public accountability in an online debt support group

Junguk Spurrier: American indifference to foreign language learning

On to ... victory?

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 03:24:44 GMT

Dang, it's been a while since I posted here. Life is busy, as always.

As I mentioned a few months ago, I joined the NDP back in September. All of the general points of agreement, and the occasional divergences, remain as they were - not that my politics are set in stone. I voted today online for the federal leadership. Honestly, having lived in Quebec for a decade, all the sucking up to Quebec is vaguely patronizing. "Oh, we need to make sure that our fragile hold on the province doesn't fade away! Oh, the Quebecois electorate is so fickle!" Blah blah blah. You elect a charismatic, competent leader who speaks French, and beyond that you don't have to kiss anyone's ass. Everyone with an ounce of sense knows that the NDP didn't win in Quebec last year, as much as all the other parties lost, especially the Bloc. Layton wasn't radically different in 2011 than he was in 2004 or 2006 or 2008. And of course, the rhetoric when there are Quebec losses in 2015 - and there will be losses, almost inevitably, because there's virtually nowhere to go but down! - will be that it was because whoever we picked in 2012 wasn't Jack. And that's crap, and everyone knows it, but the rhetoric is inevitable. Ah well, ultimately the next three years will matter a whole lot more than the next week.

Anyway, I was thinking of doing the online voting round by round on the day of the convention but I decided instead to just do my preferential vote online today. So that's done. I do expect to get multiple robocalls over the next week, of course. For the record, I ranked three candidates, two of whom have a chance of winning. We'll see.

New Analytical Archaeological Perspectives

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 01:35:19 GMT

In 2006, when my dissertation supervisor Bruce Trigger passed away, I was assigned the task of supervising the distribution of his books, offprints, etc. to various individuals and institutions. Mostly that didn't give me any real power but it did have some perks, like getting to read all his old correspondence that was tucked away inside his books. But perhaps the most awesome thing about it were the offprints. For, you see, Bruce had a massive collection of offprints, some of which dated to the 1930s and 1940s, and others of which were signed by super-famous folks in the world of anthropology and archaeology.    Which was all cool.

But then there was the weird stuff, like old copies of mimeographed working papers by people whose relationship to data was tenuous at best. Or the photocopied version of a manuscript entitled 'Proto-Indo-European-Beothuk: Beothuk as an Indo-European Language with Proto-Celtic Loans', which, the title page informs me, can be obtained from the author at $10 per copy but which Bruce received for free.     There's more like that. It's awesome.

But my very favourite of all is the following manuscript:

For those of you who may not be up on the nuances of early 1970s archaeological theory, this is a parody of the work of two of the chief figures of the processual archaeology movement, Lewis Binford and David Clarke, which, loosely and probably unfairly put, is a species of positivist ecological determinism, a la Jared Diamond. The author, Donn Bayard, had just finished his PhD at the University of Hawaii based on fieldwork in Thailand, and was in the process of moving to the University of Otago in New Zealand, and was one of the fiercest critics of the processuals (as if 'Crescat theoretice, data reducantur' weren't enough).     I knew of Bayard's work because he had crossed between archaeology and linguistic anthropology, just as I did, and because he was just generally awesome. But I didn't know until today, when I finally got around to pulling out this old offprint and scanning it into a pdf, that he was in fact 'Binclarke'.    (The non-Western script is Thai, including the Thai numeral 2514 next to 1971, which was the year in the Buddhist calendar. It's meticulous and ridiculous, all at once.

Here is the link to the full PDF (1.2 MB), which I am putting up for the sake of posterity (barring a request to remove it). It is, may I remark, made of incredible awesome sauce, as the kids these days like to say.     The text is, well, it's like the Postmodernism Generator, only for archaeology of a certain day and age, but also chock full of oblique references to actual stuff including actual archaeologists, references to fictitious books like Our Finny Friends through Prehistory by Phokos P. Seal, and other things that could only have been written by a human. But as if that weren't enough, the maps and charts stand above all other academic parody I've ever seen. Check this out (Fig. 3):

I have to stop now. I'm laughing too hard at the 'Neolithic Regulators' and the 'Cul-de-Sac' and the 'Sociocultural Exoskeleton' and 'Racial Memory' all tucked away down there.   You'll either have to read it yourself, or just trust me that the 'Wild Composite Ancestor with Earliest Patrilineal Food' is a thing of beauty, or that there is a thing called the 'Zone of Multidimensional Balls of All Sorts.' No, wait. Don't trust me. Go and read it.

Long live Roy!

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 03:55:51 GMT

At long last we are returned from our two-week journey to the Far East (of Canada) and back. I am planning on collapsing out of utter exhaustion very shortly, leaving piles of presents and garbage strewn all about. But I felt I should mark today as the first time Arthur got to make a D&D character, which he'd been asking us to do for months now, but most vigorously over the past few weeks while we'd been away, and we promised him that once we got back to Windsor in January he could play. Well, we hadn't been back for three hours before he was ready to go, making his first character, Roy, who is, essentially, Roy from Order of the Stick, except that he looks like an older version of Arthur, apparently. The setting, such as it is, will be Julia's Aveyrone Empire and it looks like I'm the GM for the two of them. After making the character (with help of course) he insisted on playing a 'demo', for which he pulled out one of the dungeon tiles that balthcat gave us and insisted that I run it for them. A hobgoblin was defeated and there was much rejoicing. Arthur hasn't quite figured out that he doesn't just get to say what is going to happen next, but seemed to have a good time and insisted on telling the enemy, just as he was dying, that he'd be back in the real game, since this was just a demo.

So I present to you:

Tales from the nerdery

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 02:23:20 GMT

Arthur has taken an interest in chemistry lately - well, not *actual* chemistry, but he has discovered that when you put elements together, you get molecules, and so he spends a lot of time asking me things like, "What happens when you put six titaniums with one hydrogen?" and so on. So this evening we were at the pool, and so of course he asked about chlorine, and happened to ask:

A: What happens when you put one chlorine with one hydrogen?
S: Oooh, then you can get hydrochloric acid!
A: Did you say ACID?
S: Yup! And if you stuck your hand in it, it would burn and burn! We might even have to amputate!
A: You mean like Terry Fox?
S: Yes, but Terry Fox didn't dip his leg in hydrochloric acid. He got cancer.
A: It was very sad.

Intermittent productions

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 22:53:51 GMT

I'm looking at the official description of the boundary of my provincial riding (electoral district) just now, where I learn that it is "that part of the City of Windsor lying westerly and southerly of a line described as follows: commencing at the intersection of the international boundary between Canada and the United States of America with the northwesterly production of Langlois Avenue; thence southeasterly along said production and Langlois Avenue to Tecumseh Road East; thence easterly along said road to Pillette Road; thence southeasterly along Pillette Road and its intermittent productions to the southerly limit of said city."

I was curious about the use of the noun production and in particular the phrase intermittent productions. I wasn't familiar with this usage, so I presumed it must be some sort of legalese. When I Googled "intermittent productions" it seems to be the name of a film production company which drowns out a handful of results that lead to descriptions of Canadian electoral districts, including mine. You see it more clearly on the Image Search where five of the first-page results are electoral district maps. So what's going on?

The OED helps a little; it tells me that one of the senses of production is "6. Extension or lengthening in space or time" and one of the quotations seems relevant:
1984 Victoria Govt Gaz. 8 Aug. 2831/1 All that land bounded by the southern alignment of Arden Street, the western alignment of Laurens Street, the production of the southern alignment of Miller Street and a line 6 metres east of the Coburg railway line.

So from this, along with some basic knowledge of my city, I figured out that a production is what you get when you project a street along a straight line beyond its actual extent (in this case, into the Detroit River). This makes sense of 'the northwesterly production of Langlois Avenue', since that's exactly where the electoral boundary meets the international boundary (in the middle of the river right along the line followed by Langlois). And this, then, is the explanation for 'intermittent productions', because Pillette Road is not a single road (any longer) but is divided up into several segments separated by rail lines, a freeway, an airport, etc. The electoral boundary thus follows Pilette's various segments, and where there is no street, follows the intermittent productions that result from extending the street along an imaginary line. Mystery solved.

Post sauce

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 02:17:21 GMT

Arthur was in fine form today.

First, at dinner, he asked us about the word 'centurally'. I asked him, "Do you mean centrally?" to which he replied, "No, like Thirtieth Century Fox. You know ... daily, weekly, monthly, yearly ... centurally."

Later during dinner, the following conversation ensued:
Julia: "That's weak sauce."
Arthur: "No, it's awesome sauce."
Julia: "That's lame sauce."
Arthur: "No, it's fame sauce."
Steve: "No, it's blame sauce."
Arthur: "Will-you-stop-saying-the-word-sauce sauce?"
So he developed a game where you had to end every sentence with the word 'sauce' or else you were out.

Then, on the way home from swimming lessons, he commented that there were a lot of signs for our local NDP candidate (which there are), and mentioned how there were some signs with his picture and others with just his name. I told him that when we go to vote, the ballots will only have the candidates' names and parties, like, for instance, Helmi Charif, New Democratic Party. To which he replied thoughtfully, "What happened to the old party?" I said, "What party?" and he said, "You know, the Old D.P. The ODP and the NDP." Good question, little dude. So being a good dad, I gave him a brief history of the CCF.

9/26 report

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 22:30:50 GMT

Every year for the past several years I've been tracking the number of jobs listed on the American Anthropological Association job postings as of September 26. That date is somewhat arbitrary and I chose it for historical reasons, but a slightly different date wouldn't really change much with the overall trends. As a proxy for the health of the job market in anthropology, though, the AAA listings are ideal, since virtually every tenure-stream position in the discipline gets listed there. So here we have it, including the 2011 figure:

2006: 190
2007: 186
2008: 168
2009: 78
2010: 112
2011: 117

So, basically flat from last year with possibly a very slight improvement from last year. But five jobs could easily be random fluctuation since you never know when the new postings will go up. Certainly we are still well below the 2006-2008 period which are generally reckoned in the field as having been quite good years.

The engeekening

Sun, 25 Sep 2011 16:29:44 GMT

Last night, Arthur and I were reading a poem about Charlie the chattering chipmunk that his teacher sent home. I asked him, "Can you think of any other words that start with the 'ch' sound?" to which he replied with a twinkle in his eye, "Charisma!"

Then, this morning, he came into our bedroom and instructed us, without any introduction, "Get me to Wikipedia and find the history of Windows loading screens." I found him a site, and then crawled back into bed. Fifteen minutes later he came in and announced, "Actually, I found a better site." Which he had, and proceeded to look at for the next half hour.

Remembering membership

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 02:52:57 GMT

In general, I am not now a joiner of causes. It's not that I don't have social and political opinions - you better know that I do - but I generally find most organizations to be so ridiculously managed or so full of annoying people that I find myself expressing strong opinions about how they are run, and then taking on positions of leadership, because (as you will know if you know me) I am one of those "if it has to be done right, I'll have to do it myself" sort of people, coupled with the fact that I am constitutionally incapable of keeping my mouth shut. Which is, among so many other things, one of the great things about curtana in that I actually trust her to do things right, which is why, though we may certainly disagree, we work very well together organizing things.

In high school, I packed my days full of extracurricularity; I think the year I was in four bands, bridge club, science club, Reach for the Top, Venturers, and ... something else that I'm forgetting, was probably the worst it got, but in none of these cases was I forced to join anything by parents or teachers or anyone else. I just ... did.   And in most of these groups, I took on lots of responsibility, because that was the thing to do. And certainly my parents were models for this; both of them had very active social lives when it came to serving in various organizations.    But basically, over the past 20 years (as it is now coming up on my 20 year HS reunion ... sigh), I haven't joined much of anything. I was on the executive of my undergrad anthropology club for a year ... I remember nothing else about that group other than that I was on the executive, not even what position I held.   I served on various committees as a grad student, but that was more in the line of professional training.    The one major exception was the McGill Gamers' Guild where I was a member pretty much the whole time we were in Montreal, even though it, like all the other institutions and organizations I've been involved in, was full of incompetence and ridiculous drama (sorry, all you old Guild people ... but you know I'm right!) and was perpetually in need of someone to kick everyone else in the pants. But there, because I was barred from serving as an executive, cruelly, because I was a grad student, I got to be the eminence grise or the First Lady of the Guild by virtue of curtana's steady leadership.   But basically the only reason I was in the Guild was that that was where all my friends were. Since that time ... nothing new.

So the upshot is that in general, I don't join nearly as many things as I believe in, and don't fill my days with volunteering, serving on boards of things, etc.   I do end up serving on a lot of committees at work, which has some of the same characteristics as joining a group (I do seem to speak up a lot, surprise surprise), but I do get paid for this, after all, and even then, the most rewarding service I do is as the graduate director, which rarely involves me negotiating a large group of people, a handful at most.

Last week I joined both the federal and provincial NDP.  I've never been a member of a specific political party, but it's the only obvious one that fits, although my disagreements with certain planks of NDP policy is, I suppose, a matter of record if one should choose to go wading into my older posts. I suppose the impetus for doing so was our trip to Toronto for Jack Layton's funeral, although it was something I'd thought about before.    Partly it's because as an international commuter I've got to keep ties to my home and native land and have been feeling more disengaged from our politics since we moved to Windsor. Partly it's that Canadian social democrats are so damned polite that they often forget to mention the fact in public, so they remain invisible. I don't know what I'll do with or about my new memberships - I mean, I will be 'card-carrying' as soon as they get around to sending me a card, but who cares about a damn card anyway?   The things that keep me interested in politics - civil liberties, electoral reform, education, and economic justice - all desperately need attention. So I suppose I'll have to see what needs to be done right.

Sabbatical infiltration

Sun, 04 Sep 2011 05:16:12 GMT

So, I am now on sabbatical! Technically I believe my sabbatical started on August 15 which was the first day of the academic year, but in terms of its impact, it started this Wednesday when classes started and I sat around most of the day, except for the part where I took Arthur to meet his Grade 1 teacher. So that's all right. It's actually a very weird experience, so far, because I think I'm the sort of person who just isn't constitutionally suited to being told, "Go forth and ... well, actually it doesn't matter what you do, just don't come to campus."   I enjoy hanging around the office, talking to students, heck, I even like the committee work for the most part.   This is, well, this is kind of like grad school, with no firm deadlines and no formal obligation to do anything except a vague injunction to read and write. Oh, except I get paid a heck of a lot more and know exactly what I'll be returning to in January. So there's that.

My chair has been saying to me, "What are you doing here? Shouldn't you be on sabbatical?" since about the first of August, even though I was in the middle of my fieldwork then and thus had to be on campus, and she knew this perfectly well. And since then, she has been reinforcing to me how a sabbatical should be a time to relax, how I should spend time with Arthur, take it easy, etc.   When I told this to my friend Dr. Virgo, she actually got a bit miffed, insofar as our chair has never, ever told her to relax or take it easy. My instinct is that at least part of this is that my chair is worried that I'm about to burn out, which, uh, no. I may have all sorts of problems but burning out is not one of them. It's far more likely that I'd just blow through these four months without doing anything productive than that I'd somehow overstress myself during my sabbatical and thus come back improperly ... relaxed, or whatever.

The thing is, I have three HUGE datasets to work with over the next four months: my stop signs, for which I've almost convinced myself that I don't need to collect any more data (4000 stop signs, giant photo database, GIS stuff, etc.), and for which I have a whole lot of stuff written in various fragments; my Math Corps ethnography (hundreds of hours of recordings and a four-inch-high stack of field notes to turn into some articles or maybe a short book); and a new project on the sociolinguistics of English numerals for which I have several hundred PDFs of texts from the past 200 years to analyze. Not all of these are going to be completed by January! To top that off, I have editorial duties on the seemingly neverending memorial volume for my supervisor, another article which has been hanging around for far too long and just needs to get out to a journal, any journal, and a conference paper in November. Oh, and yes, I almost forgot, I have plans to read around two books per week throughout the next four months.

Ahhh ... well, I guess I have a few things to do, and I just have to figure out how to do them. I think part of the key for me will be to shower and shave by 7:30 am and to drive Arthur to school every day, which is probably what I'd be doing anyway (Julia leaves for work earlier than Arthur needs to get to school, and gets home later than he could be picked up at the afterschool program), but actually being at home, dressed and with coffee in hand by 8:30 am will be a good motivator for doing a lot of work. The risk, as always, is that I will fritter my time away on such things as playing Civilization V, drawing maps or making hundreds of NPCs for a future RPG campaign, making long-overdue revisions to the Phrontistery, or mucking about on my smartphone.   Over the past two weeks I've been doing a bunch of transcription and a bunch of new writing on my Math Corps project, though, so things are looking up.

A fantastic (fantasmic?) question

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 00:37:29 GMT

An astute Phrontistery reader inquires:

I was wondering if you could help me with a word issue. I was just reading some stuff on the Internet today and came across pleonasm. Later on in the article, they used the term "pleonastic". A look up one m-w.com confirmed that this was a correctly derived form of the word "pleonasm". Seconds before reading this word, though, I wrote down (notes for my own enjoyment) the term *"pleonasmic". What is going on here that makes my word not a word? Is this a rule of English that I have neglected to learn, or is this just a quirky irregularity of this splendid/abysmal language?

The phenomenon you're observing results from the tension between Greek principles for forming adjectives and English ones. In English, -ic is productive (i.e. you can use it as a suffix on new words and are unlikely to cause any eyebrows to rise). In contrast, -astic is not productive, which is why you coined 'pleonasmic', which sounds lovely to me. However, all English words ending in -asm derive from Greek, and the vast majority of them form adjectives using '-astic', which is the anglicized version of the Greek suffix -astikos:

spasm --> spastic
iconoclasm --> iconoclastic
sarcasm --> sarcastic
enthusiasm --> enthusiastic
phantasm --> fantastic
pleonasm --> pleonastic

In fact, plastic also follows this model, although plasm is far less common than plasma, and is mostly used in the phrase germ plasm. But there is one common word where the -asm / -astic pattern does not hold true, and where -asm becomes -asmic: orgasm --> orgasmic. Partly this may be because while Greek orgasmos is attested in ancient texts, orgastikos (the expected form) is not. Partly it may be that orgasm came into English via the intermediary of French rather than one of the classical languages. And partly it may be that orgasm is used in different, uh, contexts.

There is actually an archaic form orgastic, but it has long since fallen out of use: you can see its rise and fall here, and see that in fact orgastic was more common than orgasmic in English until about 1965. Make of that what you will. However, some of those hits for orgastic may be misspelled or improperly scanned orgiastic. Surprisingly, orgy/orgiastic and orgasm/orgasmic, although both are Greek-derived, are basically unrelated to one another; orgasmos derives ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *wrog- 'to burgeon, to swell', while orgy derives from Greek orgia, 'secret rites in honour of Bacchus', and ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *werg- 'to work' and is closer to ergonomic, organ, or urge, etymologically, than it is to orgasm. Or so says the OED.

Two other -asm words that normally take an -asmic rather than an -astic adjectival form are protoplasm and ectoplasm, but these are really quite rare and both, like orgasm, have archaic -astic variants. Also, there are several -astic words like drastic and elastic that, while of Greek derivation, have no -asm nominal form either in Greek or in English (e.g. *elasm, *drasm). Finally, chasm has no common adjectival form, although a couple of centuries ago you might find chasmic or chasmatical or chasmal.

Thanks very much for your interesting question! I greatly enjoyed looking up semi-naughty words in the dictionary (who doesn't?), in the cause of research.

Pot and tubas

Sat, 27 Aug 2011 16:57:46 GMT

Well it's getting pretty busy here at Nathan Phillips Square waiting for the procession to start. As Julia puts it, the sound of tubas and the scent of "NDP magic" are in the air. One hopes Jack would approve.

Posted via LiveJournal app for Android.

Six weeks since my last confession

Sat, 27 Aug 2011 02:22:19 GMT

Well, I figure I should get at least one post in this month. Dang. I promised myself that even if I couldn't stave off the obsolescence of LJ I wouldn't contribute to it. But here we are. My fieldwork is over, not only for this year but for this entire project, and I've pretty much been sleeping and playing Civilization V for the past week and a half as a reward.

Tomorrow we're heading to Toronto to see whether we can get anywhere close to Jack Layton's state funeral. I really don't like these sorts of things with a crush of bodies trying to get from place to place. It's not the crowds themselves, but the inability to get from Point A to Point B while in the crowd. I guess we'll see. I can't imagine there not being a massive crowd given how popular he was in Toronto. At least we're not driving downtown. But Layton was one of very few Canadian politicians I actually respect, and the outpouring of support over the past few days gives me at least a little hope that even with him gone our Official Opposition will continue to be a formidable force.

Anyway, I don't know if any of my Toronto peeps are actually still reading my LJ but who aren't on Facebook, but if you're going to be around and want to try to meet up, comment below and I'll message you with some contact info, or whatever.

End of an era

Sat, 16 Jul 2011 14:55:03 GMT

So I've finally given in to the dark side and got myself a smartphone. This is partly because my old phone died a death by a thousand and finally gave in, and partly because I really do have work-related needs for it, and partly because it's only minimally more expensive than a new non-smartphone, and of course partly because I'm a giant geek who likes shiny things. But seriously, my old phone was a dinosaur even when I got it two and a half years ago.

For any of you who may be interested, my new precious is a Samsung Galaxy Captivate, and is very shiny so far. The hardest part of the upgrade was getting the lovely folks at Rogers to get me a decent plan with US data roaming at a reasonable price. I got that sorted out yesterday evening at around 7:30 pm, $10.00 a month cheaper than they had originally quoted me, even, and then by 8:30 I had my new phone which will only cost $50. Sweet!

So as you may have surmised, I am typing this entry from the new phone, even though I'm less than 10 feet from the nearest actual computer. Hopefully I'll come to my senses shortly.

Posted via LiveJournal app for Android.

The A word

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 01:54:58 GMT

Scene: A middle-class family is watching Mythbusters, completely unaware that hilarity is about to strike.

Arthur: I have to say the A word in the next sentence.
Mom: What A word?
Arthur: [spells out A-S-S with his fingers]
Mom and Dad: ... well, that would be OK, if you need to use it.
Arthur: Did they just say 'ass mustard' on the TV?
Mom and Dad: [doubled over in laughter]
Dad: I'm pretty sure what they said was 'pass muster'.

Good news in local bilingualism

Sat, 09 Jul 2011 03:18:40 GMT

So apparently Arthur has overcome his longstanding hatred of the French language. For those of you who don't know, he was in a French-only daycare for a year in 2007-08 and picked up nothing, although he did learn to count to four in Spanish from Handy Manny. So today, after finishing playing with his new Nintendo 3DS (for which many thanks go out to various relations who sent him birthday money), he was looking at the various pamphlets and flyers telling him about all the accessories he could buy, and remarked, "The French for 'Wii Kid Friendly Remote' is 'Télécommande Playchuk Mini'. I bet you didn't know I knew that in French". I then noted that it said below that, "Available in pink and green / Disponible dedans rose et vert," and I showed him how rose and vert meant 'pink' and 'green'. We then worked through the rest of the French colours using the colours on his Spiderman pajamas. Then we moved on to brushing his teeth, since it was bedtime.

Me: "See, your toothpaste is sort of vert and sort of bleu."
Arthur: "It's vert-bleu."
Me: "Yeah, you could say that."
Arthur: "What's the French word for 'ish'?"
Me: "... well, I guess 'esque'."
Arthur: Esc! Like on the keyboard!
Me: [breaks out laughing]
Arthur: It's vert-esc-bleu.

So that's coming along.

Archaeologist Arthur presents...

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 19:55:55 GMT

This year, one of Arthur's big wishes for his birthday was a science kit. He got one at Christmas, and it contained a booklet telling him all the other wonderful kits they sell, and so he went through the book and diligently checked off all the other ones he wanted, making it much, much easier for me to go to Scholar's Choice and get one he wanted: the Crystal Mining kit, which is basically a hunk of plaster with some semiprecious rocks inside and some digging tools. Okay, well, I'm not giving it the rave review it deserves, so let me turn it over to Arthur:

He is shirtless, by the way, because it really is quite dusty, not because he insisted on doing his work bare-chested. I did try to explain to him that geologists dig up rocks, while archaeologists also dig up rocks, but hope to find rocks modified by humans. I don't think it was successful, however, especially because, now that he has excavated a piece of rose quartz, I can guarantee you that these crystals have been modified by humans prior to their extraction!