The Web of Language

administrator@englishprofi.com — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 03:58 AM CDT

dhesse@du.edu wrote: "

Farmer: Glad to meet you. Where do you come from?

Professor: It is improper to end a sentence with a preposition.

Farmer: I'm very sorry. Where do you come from, a**hole?

That is a simple joke but it made me smile :)

I am always avoiding sentences that end in a preposition, not sure I will use this though

Kyrgyzstan has historical reasons for its official bilingualism

roberta.wedge@gmail.com — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 05:45 PM CDT

I will leave it to the US citizens to decide the relevance of the linguistic parallel to their country, but on a point of fact, Kyrgyzstan has two official languages, Russian and Kyrgyz, which exist in an uneasy tension. In the days of the Russian Empire and then the USSR, Russian was the medium of official communication, and this privileged the ethnic Russians, who were posted all over as civil servants, managers, technicians, and professionals. In addition, Stalin and later leaders shifted great swathes of population, such that even now one in eight citizens of Kyrgyzstan are of Russian ethnicity (and slightly more are Uzbeks, but their language has no official status). And finally, one thing the Soviet Union did very efficiently was to teach Russian as a second language, to tie the empire together.

With nationhood in the early 1990s, all the former Soviet republics faced the decision of how to define themselves. Often, one of the first decisions was to resuscitate the mother tongue as an instrument of ethnic pride and government power. The Baltic states did this with the intermittent spotlight of the European Union upon them. Most of the 'stans did this in a short-sighted and vindictive manner, declaring the language of the majority (Tajik, Turkmen, Uzbek) the official language, and effectively dispossessing those who spoke only Russian. They were encouraged (there's a nice euphemism) to go "home" to Russia, although in fact they and their parents may well have been born in the constituent republic and had never left it. This triggered a massive brain drain, as the most educated tranche of the population left. Krgyzstan was one of only two 'stans to refuse the easy populist step of establishing a single state language: Russian and Kyrgyz have equal status under the constitution.

It would be misleading to think of a Kyrgyz citizen who spoke only Russian as being linguistically deracinated: most monoglots are the descendents of Russian immigrants, not settled nomads who have lost their ancestral tongue along with their herds of milking mares. The test given to the presidential candidates strikes me as a proxy for racial or ethnic selection. What lessons there are for the United States in this, it is not for me to say.

Standardization is not legislation

linguaphile@techarcana.com — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 12:20 PM CDT

The best solution is to standardize on one language and invite people to conform, and English is the natural language for that.

This is already what happens in the U.S. By convention, the populace speaks English. Products, signs, junk mail, all these things are written in English. Yes, there are signs that have Spanish on them, or even French. But not because they have to have them. Canada requires all packaging to have French as well as English versions, even for the people who live in British Columbia, where (I'm guessing) there are no French speakers.

Yes, in some places in the U.S., there are concentrations of immigrants who do not speak any English and the stores in the area cater to those speakers. When has this not been the case in any melting pot country? Sure, for the most part it's Spanish now, but in the first quarter of the 20th century, there were ghettos of all kinds of immigrants who spoke only the language of their homelands. And yet, their children learned English and now, those German, Chinese, etc. neighborhoods have mostly faded away.

So, there's no need to make a law stating that English is the official langauge of the country. Those who desire it really want to use it as a litmus test to determine who the illegal immigrants are. I have yet to hear an argument for having English be the official language which will actually make life on the whole easier or more satisfactory for Americans.

Not a perfect comparison

eje_usenet@yahoo.com — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 09:26 AM CDT

Your comparison to Kyrgystan is not a perfect one. That would be more like, to use your example, trying to impose a minority native language like some Indian one on a populace that is accustomed to a conqueror's language. Fact is, the vast majority of people in the U.S. already speak English. To legislate it as an official language would maintain its dominance, not impose it on a great number of citizens who don't know it, as was the case in Kyrgystan. Maybe a better example might be India, where English is necessary to maintain national unity in the face of many disparate languages. A country divided, by language or anything, cannot stand. If we fractionalize into different societies who can't mutually communicate, if we can't conduct the business of state in a common parlance, we risk falling apart as a nation. At least Kyrgystan has Russian to keep them together. Since by nature we are a nation of immigrants, it is not possible to accomodate everyone's language in the affairs of state (so while countries like Israel and Wales have a natural bilinguality or trilinguality, we do not). We can't write government forms in a hundred different languages. The best solution is to standardize on one language and invite people to conform, and English is the natural language for that.

Couldn't agree more!

MakBeth19@yahoo.com — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 03:05 AM CDT

You said "I favor English as the requisite language, and, at the same time, favor teaching two, three or languages starting in Kindergarten or earlier." and I wholeheartedly concur!! I live in Hawai`i where almost everyone is of some variety of ethnic mixture, and language is often up for grabs. I am learning Hawaiian (in an attempt not to be the Ugly American) because 1) I live here, and 2) both English and Hawaiian are the unofficially official languages (i.e. there IS no official language, but those two would be if there were). My biggest challenge comes from the first generation speakers of other languages who are doing their best to learn English, but who began that quest at a late age (some even as late as I began learning Hawaiian!).

In support of the parents with children in school, most folks who come from other countries try to make sure their children learn both the language of their heritage (Japanese, Ilocano, Tagalog, Samoan, etc.) as well as the language of their lives (English). This is true even (and sometimes especially) if the parents are less than fluent in English themselves.

It's a good start.

Columnist/Author

anne@willapabay.org — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 02:32 PM CDT

I agree with what you say; English is my second language. Though these days Spanish is often a second choice all across the United States.

Everyone in my opinion should be required by law to have a second language. Native born and immigrant alike. Canada has the right Idea on that.

The problem is not correctly stated, I believe.

rechercher01@yahoo.com — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 02:17 PM CDT

In regard to bi-lingualism, the problem is not having Spanish or any of hundreds of other languages spoken. Rather – by way of real life example – the problem is that when I go to a bank in lower New York, I often find that Spanish is the primary language, and English is only a failing accommodation. I don’t mind any accent as long as I can understand what is being said. I also don’t mind grammatical faults (my writing and speaking are far from perfect, but I try). What makes it difficult is the clear feeling that asking (or needing) to be spoken to in English is an annoyance, that I am the intruder.

When I travel elsewhere, I make an effort to at least learn “travel French” or “travel Italian” or even “travel Dutch.” It’s not just a question of avoiding being the quintessential “ugly American.” It’s a function of respect and, most importantly, wanting to be understood to obtain the services I need in that moment.

I respect the point of your reductio ad absurdum: there is no such thing as a native tongue, depending upon how far back you wish to go. I suppose mana and ma seem to be universal as far back as one goes ... as well as ugg, uhh and unmnm. Otherwise, there is a functionality to avoiding Babelism within borders.

When so many of our great-to-the-nth-power grandparents came here, they had to learn English. That was part of becoming an American. Yes, it was difficult, and some never did manage. But they understood that they were “coming to the nuisance,” that they were coming to the opportunity and had to conform with at least a minimal way of behaving. There are hundreds if not thousands of customs which are appropriate elsewhere which have no place here, even today (we might be better off if we incorporated some of them, it is true, but we are not perfect and that it not a requirement of the discussion).

In the end, those who would benefit the most from an English requirement would be those who are required to learn it: nothing would (or could) require them to not speak their own language whenever appropriate, but at least there would be a uniform system of communication so we have at least a base of common understanding from which to operate. From that launch point, we could go anywhere. Literally, literarily, and figuratively. I have often heard that English borrows from more languages and local dialects than any other language. From what I have learned, this is true. So it is clear that American English as a speakers group is not inherently linguistically bigoted or protective, as are the French.

I favor English as the requisite language, and, at the same time, favor teaching two, three or languages starting in Kindergarten or earlier. It is idiocy to wait until later grades, as we are physically wired to learn many languages in our youth, and it gets more difficult as we get older. If you want to solve the problem, don’t gloss over it, fix it at the root. Reforming the teaching system is the root; everything else is just a paint job. I realize this seems far afield from the original premise, but as with so many things, the problem is often not the apparent problem at hand, but the underlying problem ... or the problem underlying that.

Saxon only...

joel@carsonparkdesign.com — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 01:24 PM CDT

Is "English only" sufficient? Shouldn't we bar Latin, Greek, and French imports?

Supreme Court strikes a blow against minority language rights

debaron@uiuc.edu — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 11:31 AM CDT

In a blow against minority language rights, the Supreme Court has ruled in the case of Horne v. Flores that the federal government must stop monitoring how the state of Arizona teaches its non-English-speaking students, despite evidence that these students continue to do much worse than their English-speaking peers in school.

Seventeen years ago a group of Nogales, Arizona, parents whose children spoke little or no English sued the state, charging that their children had been denied “equal educational opportunity [by failing] to take appropriate action to overcome language barriers” as required by the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974 (EEOA, 20 U. S. C. §1703). In 2000, the federal district court found that the state had violated the EEOA and issued a series of compliance orders.

But in 2006 Arizona requested relief from those earlier court orders and last week the Supreme Court ruled 5 – 4 that Arizona has made great progress in handling English language learners and so should be free from federal supervision.

But as Justice Stephen Breyer pointed out in his dissent, Arizona students classified as English Language Learners (ELL) show no signs of having overcome the “language barriers” that constitute discrimination based on national origin. Their high school graduation rate is 59%, compared with 75% for native English speakers. Overall only 28% of ELL students pass mandated standardized tests. Only 13% of ELL 7th graders passed the reading test, compared with 74% for students whose first language is English. Things are even worse in the border town of Nogales. With 37% of its students in ELL programs, Nogales High is ranked 575th out of Arizona’s 629 high schools in student achievement.

Despite these appalling numbers, the Supreme Court found that Arizona does so well educating its non-English speaking children that the state no longer needs to be monitored to make sure that it complies with the EEOA.

In his majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito pointed to the great strides that Arizona has made in addressing the needs of ELL students (though Justice Breyer’s dissent makes clear that the effectiveness of these strides is in serious doubt): increased spending on English language instruction (though not enough to make a difference in places like Nogales); improved instructional materials and teacher quality (though there are no ELL guidelines and schools like Nogales High, with large ELL populations, can’t afford top teachers); the federal No Child Left Behind Law (which requires all tests to be in English); and a shift from long-term bilingual education programs to Structured English Immersion (SEI), which gives children English instruction while they’re being taught math, science, history and literature in English as well, even though their English often isn’t good enough for them to follow the lessons.

Although Structured English Immersion was mandated when voters passed Proposition 203 in 2000, the state has yet to decide how to implement SEI instruction. As recently as 2007 a state official told the Court, “We’re getting ready to hopefully put down some models for districts to choose from.”

Both bilingual and immersion pedagogies have the potential to help ELL students transition to English. Theoretically, bilingual education ensures that students don’t fall behind in core subjects, which are taught in the student’s first language, while they are acquiring English. Theoretically, immersion creates an environment where students learn a target language quickly and efficiently because it’s the language they use 24/7. Unfortunately, neither method has managed to accomplish the goal of helping nonanglophones to succeed in school. Bilingual education and structured immersion seem to fail more often than they work. Bilingual programs are often poorly implemented, both in terms of content delivery and in their language instruction, while structured immersion experiences are typically limited to a fraction of the school day over a period of one or possibly two years, which is enough time for students to master the conversational English they need at recess or in the cafeteria, but far too short a time for students to acquire the academic English necessary for school success.

Structured immersion is further hampered by its association with anti-immigration politics. Most often it’s not an educational philosophy but an English-only pedagogy that has been written into law: “Although teachers may use a minimal amount of the child’s native language when necessary, no subject matter shall be taught in any language other than English, and children in this program learn to read and write solely in English” (Ariz. Rev. Stat. Ann. §15–751[5]). In the early 1900s, when immigration was also heavy, schools called this method “sink or swim,” and in those days, like today, most immigrants sank.

The SEI law limits Arizona students to only two years in the program, after which they must be mainstreamed with native speakers. Many language educators warn that children may need 4 or 5 years of instruction to achieve academic fluency. They further insist that the effectiveness of SEI has yet to be demonstrated. (Justice Breyer complained, as well, “The State’s own witnesses were unable firmly to conclude that the new system had so far produced significantly improved results.”) And they question the advisability of legislators requiring particular linguistic pedagogies or the legality of forbidding teachers to use a student’s native language.

The decision in Horne v. Flores is framed narrowly in terms of educational funding and the technicalities of federal oversight rules. Nonetheless, it seems at odds with the Court’s landmark decision in Meyer v. Nebraska (1923), which struck down a Nebraska law whose language bears a striking similarity to Arizona’s Prop. 203. According to that statute, “No person, individually or as a teacher, shall . . . teach any subject to any person in any language than the English language.” In Meyer the court agreed that it was certainly desirable for children to learn English, but not if English was coerced unconstitutionally:

The protection of the Constitution extends to all, to those who speak other languages as well as to those born with English on the tongue. Perhaps it would be highly advantageous if all had ready understanding of our ordinary speech, but this cannot be coerced by methods which conflict with the Constitution – a desirable end cannot be promoted by prohibited means.

Horne also goes against the spirit of another high court language precedent, Lau v. Nichols (1974), a unanimous decision which ordered schools to address the needs of non-English-speaking students:

The failure of the San Francisco school system to provide English language instruction to approximately 1,800 students of Chinese ancestry who do not speak English, or to provide them with other adequate instructional procedures, denies them a meaningful opportunity to participate in the public educational program and thus violates 601 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans discrimination based “on the ground of race, color, or national origin.”

California law at the time, like Arizona’s law today, required instruction in all subjects to be in English. Bilingual instruction was authorized only “to the extent that it does not interfere with the systematic, sequential, and regular instruction of all pupils in the English language.” But in Lau, the Supreme Court ruled that “those who do not understand English are certain to find their classroom experiences wholly incomprehensible and in no way meaningful.” Without specifying a remedy or methodology, it ordered San Francisco to “take affirmative steps to rectify the language deficiency in order to open its instructional program to these students.” Now, in Horne v. Flores, the Court is saying that as long as a state takes affirmative steps, it is in compliance with the law, even if it’s clear that those “affirmative steps” are completely ineffective.

Finding Eve's Rib? Oldest "Ms." might not have feminist origins after all

debaron@uiuc.edu — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:07 PM CDT

Word hunter Ben Zimmer reports the earliest sighting so far of “the elusive first Ms.” The word, an alternative to the marriage-specific titles Miss and Mrs, turns out to be over 100 years old. (An earlier example of Ms from 1767 [see images below] is probably an abbreviation of Miss, not the marriage-neutral, innovative Ms. that Zimmer’s been looking for.)

Not the oldest Ms? The tombstone of “Ms” Sarah Spooner, who died in 1767 in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Rendered by the stonecutter as “M” with a superscript “S” (see detail below), this is almost certainly an abbreviation of Miss or Mistress, not an example of colonial feminism or a slip of the chisel, as some have suggested.

Look closely to see the “S” carved above the “M” in this detail of “Ms.” Sarah Spooner’s headstone

Zimmer didn’t need carbon dating to determine that the article about Ms. appeared on Nov. 10, 1901, under the heading “Men, Women and Affairs” in the Springfield (Massachusetts) Sunday Republican (page 4, below the fold), and it recommended Ms. as a term to be used when you don’t know a woman’s marital status.

Today we tend to think of Ms. as coming out of the women’s movement of the 1970s, a marriage-neutral term for women that paralleled the men’s term, Mr., and that succeeded despite the howls of derision from (mostly male) language guardians.

But this 1901 use of Ms. as a new, intentionally ambiguous abbreviation for both Miss and Mrs., not a simple replacement for Miss, comes not from feminism but from more conservative “manners” advice which counseled that it might be insulting to address a married woman as “Miss” or a single one as “Mrs.”

The author of the Republican article writes (perhaps patronizingly, in the florid journalistic style of the day) that Ms. “does homage to the sex without expressing any views as to their domestic situation,” adding that the new form is eminently practical: “The abbreviation ‘Ms.’ is simple, it is easy to write, and the person concerned can translate it properly according to circumstances.” According to him (the author of the piece was probably a man), a married woman will read it as “Mrs.,” while a single one will interpret the word as “Miss.”

As for the form of Ms., we’re told, “What could be simpler or more logical than the retention of what the two doubtful words [i.e., Miss and Mrs.] have in common,” that is, the letters “M” and “S.” The author even provides Ms. with a pronunciation, “Mizz,” calling it “a close parallel to the practice long universal in many bucolic regions, where a slurred Mis’ does duty for Miss and Mrs. alike” (presumably, “bucolic” refers to rural areas and the South).

Excerpt from the Springfield Republican article on Ms., as reprinted a week later in the Salt Lake City Daily Tribune, Nov. 17, 1901, p. 21. Image courtesy of Fred Shapiro.

It’s also possible that despite this early example, Ms. comes out of 1900s progressive politics and feminism rather than “Miss Manners”-style etiquette advice. At a feminist rally in 1914, the suffragist Fola La Follette recommended Miss as a general title for women both before and after marriage. Although La Follette gives no abbreviated form, Ms. may turn out to be a shortening of this feminist repurposing of Miss after all. And as such it would have been pronounced “Miss,” except by speakers of more “bucolic” dialects of English.

Zimmer’s “elusive Ms.” resurfaces again in 1932, when M. J. Birshtein writes to the New York Times to ask whether “when addressing by letter a woman whose marital status is in doubt,” one should write “M’s” or “Miss.” Birshtein is concerned that M’s, as he writes it, is too similar to “Miss,” and he asks whether “it is too indefinite and that if it is used before the name of a single woman, it makes her extremely conscious of her ‘bachelor girl’ state and thus creates within her a real feeling of antagonism.” Birshtein’s concern would seem to make sense only if M’s was pronounced “Miss.” Unfortunately, the Times didn’t print any answers that it might have received to Birshtein’s question.

M. J. Birshtein, “ ‘Miss’ or ‘M’s’?” letter to the New York Times, May 29, 1932, p. E2. Birshtein, who sees Miss and M’s as alternatives, worries that M’s may be insulting to single women.

Ms. resurfaced briefly in 1949, in Mario Pei’s influential book The Story of Language (Pei advises his readers to pronounce it “Miss”), and again in the 1950s, when Ms. enjoyed a brief vogue in business writing textbooks. But it doesn’t really make much of a splash till the 1970s – Ms. Magazine began publishing in 1971 – though the stylistically conservative New York Times didn’t O.K. the form as “fit to print” until 1986.

Whatever the origins of Ms., the meaning of the title today has shifted. Despite its association with 1970s feminism and the fact that style guides recommend it as a marriage-neutral option, and despite the fact that many women today use the title in the way it was initially envisioned, there are also many women, perhaps a majority, who use Ms. as a trendy alternative to Miss rather than a replacement for the “Miss/Mrs.” options. (Even twenty years ago, the unmarried women teachers of my children’s public school were listed in the staff directory as “Ms.,” while the married ones were “Mrs.”) Or they associate Ms. with the unmarried women, the widows and divorcées, of their mothers’ generation.

Words often break free from their original sense and come to mean instead what people want them to mean. Titles in English are particularly unstable. In the past, Miss was often adopted by married women; Miss was used as well to refer to young women, even married ones; and Mrs. served as a term of respect for older women, married or not. Titles reflect social structure and they change along with changing social roles, so it shouldn’t surprise us if some people use Ms. to signal their feminism while others use the same term to reinforce the traditional gender roles that Ms. may have been coined to subvert.

On the other hand, if Ms. came into existence simply because letter writers feared insulting women who embraced traditional gender roles, then it looks like the once conservative though rarely-used abbreviation was radicalized as well as popularized by the 1970s women’s movement. The present status of the word as feminist for some, traditionalist for others, suggests that the radical status of Ms. may have eroded, and that while some women prefer the marriage-neutral term, others are keen on preserving the unmarried/married distinction.

Note to English-only group that can't spell "conference": Presidential candidates in Kyrgyzstan have to pass a test in Kyrgyz, their official language. Could you pass a test in English?

debaron@uiuc.edu — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 12:43 PM CDT

A major theme at Pat Buchanan's American Cause conference on "Building the New Majority" this week was making English official. Speaking under a banner reading "2009 National Conferenece," white nationalist Peter Brimelow (editor of Vdare.com) charged that Democrats don't respect English: "You're going to find that the Obama administration is going to gradually institute institutional bilingualism in the country. It's going to be required to speak Spanish in key positions, the police force and so on." But it was Republicans who were unable to spell fairly simple English words.

Pat Buchanan and Peter Brimelow think that English should be the official language of the United States. Buchanan, a former presidential candidate, apparently didn't notice the misspelled "conferenece" on his conference's banner.

Supporters of making English the official language of the United States might learn a lesson from the Kyrgyz Republic, whose constitution requires all government officials to speak Kyrgyz, the Central Asian country’s official language. Plus anyone who wants to be president of Kyrgyzstan first has to pass a Kyrgyz language test. That’s not as easy as it sounds. Seventy-eight percent of the presidential candidates failed the Kyrgyz test this year.

You might expect leaders to speak their country’s language as a matter of course, but the language of government is often the language of conquerors, not natives. When Kyrgyzstan became part of the Russian Empire in 1876, and the Soviet Union in 1919, Russian became the language of opportunity: all the local apparatchiks learned Russian, sent their children to Russian schools, and stigmatized Kyrgyz as the language of ignorant peasants and nomads.

With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Kyrgyz became the official language of the new Kyrgyz Republic, but anyone who’s anyone in the country, whether capitalist or Bolshevik, still uses Russian for school, work, and play.

Government officials also continue to use Russian, and while the nation’s laws must all be written in Kyrgyz, too often they are written in Russian first, then translated into the official language. In a further attempt to legislate Kyrgyz, starting with the 2000 election, parliament required all presidential candidates to demonstrate their Kyrgyz fluency. But because Russian remains so influential, taking a test in Kyrgyz can be problematic for the nation’s leaders.

Kyrgyzstan’s got talent: some of the 22 would-be presidential candidates taking the Kyrgyz language test.

The televised test is a linguistic triathlon requiring presidential candidates to speak, understand, and write Kyrgyz: give a fifteen-minute explanation of your platform; summarize a three-page Kyrgyz text that is read aloud to you; and write a three-page essay about your political policies in forty-five minutes.

The test is a shibboleth: if your Kyrgyz is good enough to satisfy a majority of the nine judges, you’re allowed to run for president – even if you wind up running Kyrgyzstan in Russian. If you fail, you’re off the ballot. The constitution forbids discrimination “based upon lack of knowledge or command of the state language,” but that doesn’t apply to presidential candidates.

Fans of the test praise its commitment to the language of independence. Critics charge that, because the Central Election Commission that administers the test reports directly to the president, the Kyrgyz test is rigged to keep the current president’s opponents out of power. Five of the twelve candidates failed the first test, in 2000, though incumbent president Askar Akayev, a fluent Russian speaker, passed easily and was re-elected.

Only five of the twenty-two presidential wannabes passed this year’s test. This includes the current president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who grew up in Russia and is married to a Russian, and who barely passed the language test back in 2000. Bakiyev was appointed president in 2005 after Akayev fled the country during the “Tulip Revolution,” and to no one’s surprise, Pres. Bakiyev passed with flying colors when he took the Kyrgyz language test earlier this month. It seems the election commissioners are still eager to hold on to their jobs.

President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, a native Russian speaker, is one of 5 presidential candidates to pass the Kyrgyz language test administered by the Central Election Commission, which incidentally reports directly to the president. The 17 who failed the test will not appear on the ballot. It’s rumored that some of them won’t appear anywhere again.

Some Americans seem to feel that today, in the United States, the English language isn’t getting the respect that it deserves. They’d like to follow Kyrgyzstan’s example and make English America’s official language, because they think that if they don’t, everyone will wind up speaking Spanish or Chinese, or maybe even Kyrgyz.

But English in America isn’t a native language. It’s not even native to England. Like Russian in Kyrgyzstan, English in these countries is a conqueror’s language. The Anglo-Saxons brought their language to Britain when they invaded the island in the mid-5th century BCE, ruling their new home in English, not Celtic.

As for the United States, when English-speaking invaders – they called themselves settlers – came to the New World, they drove out Wampanoag, the language of the Indians who greeted the Pilgrims, as well as other Native American languages, not to mention Spanish and French, languages brought here by other European “settlers.” Later English speakers did their best to stifle German, Swedish, Polish, Italian, and Yiddish. And today they’re adding Chinese, Vietnamese, Hindi, Arabic, and even Russian to the language hit list.

Supporters of official English might also think it would be good to follow another Kyrgyzstan example and make all future American presidents pass an English test. After all, the English-speaking ability of some presidents – Andrew Jackson, Calvin Coolidge, George W. Bush – has been called into question.

Another argument against presidential language testing: Vice President Dan Quayle tells a student that he left the final ‘e’ off potato.

Historically, though, even some English kings didn’t speak English. William, Duke of Normandy, brought French to England when he invaded the island in 1066. For the next 330 years England’s rulers spoke French, or were bilingual, but not until Henry IV was there another English king who could only speak English. Later still, George I, who was born in Germany and became king of England in 1714, spoke only German from the English throne, though he may eventually have learned a little English. Some political scholars have even gone so far as to argue that Barack Obama is the first truly English-speaking American president since John F. Kennedy.

In the end, though, making English official and mandating English testing won’t protect English from the competition. That’s because, unlike Kyrgyzstan, in the United States there really isn’t any language competition. Yes, there are speakers of other languages in America. There are multilingual clothing labels and product instructions. And you sometimes have to press “1” for English on the phone. But in the free-market system of language, English has achieved without protective and restrictive legislation the kind of monopoly that countries like Kyrgyzstan, with their language laws and presidential language tests, only wish they could enforce for their official languages.

On the other hand, considering the spelling ability of former Vice President Dan Quayle and former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, maybe testing presidential candidates is a good idea after all.

"When"?

djr@olemiss.edu — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 11:40 AM CDT

"All the previous 'world languages' bowed out when their sponsor-countries did ..."

Not exactly true. All the previous world languages bowed out AFTER their sponsor-countries did, and in at least one case--Latin--that "after" took centuries (depending on how you count the bowing out of the Roman Empire and the subsequent bowing out of Latin as the dominant scholarly language of Europe, fourteen or fifteen centuries).

Of course the timing of these things is pretty complex. If America does "bow out," that won't happen overnight; we could be bowing out over five years, or twenty, or fifty. And presumably the world dominance of English would last a little longer than US world domination, but how long is a little? That would be difficult to time with any kind of precision as well. But my guess would be that English would survive the crumbling of the current US empire by decades--especially given the fact that Chinese characters make Mandarin an unlikely choice for the next world language. (Unless they went to pinyin ...)

That doesn't mean that Wynne is right about the "growing" dominance of English propping up the US as it fades. Much more likely would be a scenario in which a variety of postcolonial englishes (and their pop cultures) emerge into greater international prominence; while academic English--our period's scholarly Latin--would have only vestigial effects on the US, for example helping US universities continue to attract large numbers of foreign students, and thus in some small measure helping to maintain America's international prestige. But not for long, surely--and not exclusively the US. If academic English remained the dominant language of scholars around the world for another century, say, I would imagine the emerging economic powerhouses would begin (or continue) hiring British and American scholars and creating their own centers for training in academic English. Hong Kong has been doing this for some time, for example; and there's no reason mainland China should not expand their programs in academic English as well. They're already hiking up their academic salaries, in an increasingly successful bid to begin attracting foreigners.

The American moment is waning. Will English pull us through?

debaron@uiuc.edu — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 06:06 PM CDT

The American economy is shrinking. The trade deficit is growing. U.S. military intervention is ineffective. Immigration is out of control. Not to worry, though, English will pull us through.

At least that’s what Ali Wyne, a junior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, argues on the website of Foreign Policy. Wyne reassures anyone worried that the American moment is waning, “the growing influence of English will ensure that the United States doesn’t fade into the sunset anytime soon.”

According to Wyne, English has just added its millionth word, giving it a vocabulary twice as large as any other language. Also: there are more nonnative than native speakers of the language; everything important in journalism and in science is published in English; there are 650 million speakers of English in China and India alone; it’s the foreign language of choice around the world, even in France; and the number of languages in the world will decline precipitously from today’s count of 7,000, give or take, to a couple of hundred by 2100.

Wyne then points to the once-global languages Latin and French to conclude, “great powers and global lingua francas tend to go together.”

According to Wyne, great powers and great languages go together. But remember, too, what the linguist Max Weinreich is supposed to have said, ‘A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.’

All this makes for a great term paper (Wyne is a recent graduate of MIT), creative, exuberant, positivistic, and upbeat. Unfortunately, like too much journalism about the state of English, it’s all based on myth and misinformation.

First off, English doesn’t have 1,000,000 words. Recently a publicity seeker has been making this claim, but it’s not based on any reliable word count. The Oxford English Dictionary records some 600,000 English words, many of them obscure and technical, and most people use a small fraction of that total. Besides, when it comes to vocabulary, size doesn’t matter. Shakespeare used 28,000 different words in his plays and poems, while the King James translation of the Bible has about 8,000 – and no one would dispute the intellectual or aesthetic power of either. Plus, I could count to a million and then claim I just added another million words to English. However, saying it doesn’t make it so.

As for the “fact” that there are three times as many people using English as a second language than there are native speakers, that may be true if it means you can say “Hello,” “dude,” “O.K.,” “Coca-Cola,” and “Yankee go home.” But if it means that you can use the language effectively in a variety of professional and informal situations, then the number of second-language speakers who have a real command of English is way smaller. For example, although English is a national language in India, only about 5% of the population – maybe 50 million people – actually speak it.

Yes, many students in China, Korea, and Japan are learning English, but a few hours’ instruction a week doesn’t generally lead to fluency. That’s no surprise: although many students in America are learning Spanish in school, most can barely make their way through a Taco Bell menu, let alone speak to someone in Madrid or Buenos Aires.

It’s true that English is the language of science, where it’s often supplemented by math, graphs, and charts. But so far as journalism goes, most readers get their news in their native language, not in English translation. And while the internet began its life in English, the dominance of English on the Web waned sharply once computers spread around the world and software allowed the representation of non-roman writing systems on line. Wikipedia still has close to 3 million articles in English, but German, French, Japanese and Dutch are catching up fast, and there are even 115,000 entries on Wikipedia’s Esperanto site.

Finally there’s the issue of language loss. Wyne’s dismal prediction that there will be only 200 languages left by 2100 is way out of line, and even if it proves true that won’t bolster English’s market share, since less widely-spoken languages are giving way to other local languages with more prestige, not to the juggernaut of world English (juggernaut, by the way, is a Hindi word).

Wyne’s conclusion that world-wide demand for English would ensure America’s continued prestige in the world is flawed. Languages don't prop up nations. Instead, nations prop up languages.

Latin became a power tongue because the Roman Empire was a world power (at least in Europe and North Africa). After Rome fell, Latin retained some influence as the language of the Catholic Church and the language of learning (though only in the West), but everyday Latin, no longer under the sway of empire, did not, and it gradually evolved into what we now call the romance languages. One of them, French, only achieved widespread use as France became a leading European power from the 17th to the 19th centuries, but it too waned with the decline of French colonialism and the humiliating defeat of France in the 20th century’s two world wars. And Russian was the language to know for the Soviet in-crowd, but once the U.S.S.R. dissolved, the Russian language's red star faded fast.

English has its own rags-to-riches story. Initially an immigrant language brought by Europeans to an obscure island in the North Atlantic, English gained strength during the Renaissance in tandem with British sea power, and it was further pumped up by colonialism, the industrial revolution, and the eventual dominance of America, to the point where it’s now the global language of international capitalism, science and technology, and rock ’n’ roll.

Of course Wyne’s report of the death of the American moment may be premature. Although other economies may be declining less rapidly, there’s still a world-wide recession, not just an American one. And while one or two other countries may have more manpower, the American military probably still holds the edge in firepower.

But take away those props – the army, the navy, the almighty dollar, and the Fender guitar (most are made in Mexico, by the way) – and it’s likely that the title of “World Language” will pass to whatever country takes the place of the U.S. as the one to be feared or imitated. All the previous “world languages” bowed out when their sponsor-countries did, and no one should be surprised that if America drops in the global rankings, English won’t be there to prop it up and give it a second shot at the title.

Why English spelling needs improving more than ever before

mashabell@aol.com — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 04:00 AM CDT

I went to Washington to raise awareness of the problems and costs caused by the inconsistency of English spelling in 2007 and again this year. I found that almost nobody had trouble understanding that the inconsistency of English spelling - with changing letter sounds as in ‘our, pour, courteous, tourist, courier,’ and ‘different spellings for identical sounds as in ‘leave, sleeve, believe, even’ - makes learning to read and write much harder than need be, but that almost nobody had ever been made aware of this link before. That is the main obstacle to reform: people are not aware of the harm that the irregularities of English spelling do.

Ben Franklin advocated spelling reform because he thought that the proper functioning of democracy depended on having a literate and well-informed populace. The fact that the people of both the US and the UK re-elected Bush and Blair even after it had become clear that they had taken their countries into an unjustified and illegal war makes me think that this may be due to both countries having relatively high levels of functional illiteracy and millions of virtually completely uneducated citizens.

Masha Bell

www.englishspellingproblems.co.uk (2006),

‘Spellmender’ on You Tube,
Ex teacher of English and modern languages,

now independent literacy researcher and writer,
author of 'Understanding English Spelling' (2004),
'Learning to Read' (2007)

(and 'Rules and Exceptions of English Spelling' due out soon)

A spelling reformer writes to Mr. Lincoln

debaron@uiuc.edu — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 12:51 AM CDT

In 1859, a Methodist minister named A. B. Pikard wrote two letters to former senator Abraham Lincoln -- Lincoln had lost his seat to Stephen Douglas in 1858 -- protesting the inhumanity of the fugitive slave laws. It’s no surprise to find a northern abolitionist minister opposing the return of runaway slaves to the masters they’d escaped. But a minister who uses the phonetic alphabet to argue that the practice is both immoral and unconstitutional, well that is unusual.

Although Lincoln's response does not survive, he did answer Pikard’s first letter. This prompted Pikard to write again explaining the advantages of phonetic spelling:

from the Lincoln Papers in the Library of Congress, Aug. 6, 1859, or as Pikard wrote it, Ogust 6.

I am veri mug oblijd dat u ssud tink enuf ov min tu ansr it -- I trust u wil hav no difikulti in redin dis;-- u se it is ritn in de Fonetik Alfabet, and if u deturmin a letr in eni plas u deturmin it in evri plas--

[I am very much obliged that you should think enough of mine to answer it. I trust you will have no difficulty in reading this;-- you see it is written in the Phonetic Alphabet, and if you determine a letter in any place you determine it in every place--]

Pikard then laid out more reasons for repealing fugitive slave laws.

The nineteenth century saw a number of proposals to replace the apparent chaos of English spelling with a rational system in which each letter transcribed a single sound, and each sound was represented by one and only one letter.

There were plenty of objections to these plans – they’d require massive re-education efforts, along with reprinting everything in the new spelling. They’d obscure etymologies. And there was the insurmountable problem of deciding whose pronunciation would serve as the phonetic standard on which to base the spellings, and then getting everyone to adopt the new spellings.

But the reformers countered that phonetic spelling would cut the time needed to learn to read and write: learn the alphabet and literacy teachers would be all but out of work. It would make English easier for foreigners to learn, which was important since they predicted English was poised to become the next world language. Plus phonetic spelling would make it easy to pronounce any foreign language, and it would teach English speakers “correct” pronunciation, thus eliminating “provincial” and nonstandard dialects.

One influential supporter of phonetic spelling was Isaac Pitman, the creator of the shorthand method that was wildly popular with reporters and secretaries. Pitman devised a phonetic alphabet as well, and many American readers of his Phonetic Journal taught versions of his phonetic spelling, or systems they devised themselves, to school children. Lincoln’s correspondent, Rev. Pikard, who addressed the senator as "Mr Linkon," ran one such phonetic school in Mt. Morris, Illinois.

Stanza from a poem printed in Pitman’s phonetic alphabet, from his Phonetic Journal, 1852, p. 311.

On Aug. 17, 1852, a Dr. Stone, of Boston, demonstrated the success of the new spelling method to the National Phonetics Convention by quizzing a group of school girls called the Boston Phonetic Children in hard words of doubtful pronunciation, including phthisic, physic, pneumatic, bow, bough, and rendezvous, as well as Hohenmamucaludapopalockacalagan. They got them all, except for luminacity, a word not found in the OED.

New York Times report of the Phonetic National Convention, held on Aug. 17, 1852.

John M. Mott was only one of several inventors of new spelling systems who went so far as to petition Congress to fund their methodology. But while Americans from Benjamin Franklin to Teddy Roosevelt proposed spelling reforms, Congressional interest in either traditional or reformed spelling proved minimal. Franklin’s phonetic alphabet fell on deaf ears, and Theodore Roosevelt’s executive order directing the Government Printing Office to adopt 300 simplified spellings recommended by the Simplified Spelling Board generated so much public outrage that Congress actually threatened to withhold the GPO’s funding, and Roosevelt backed down.

But for some, simplified spelling, which dispensed with unnecessary letters and regularized some common irregularities, offered an attractive alternative to the more radical phonetic reforms. Joseph Medill championed simplified spelling for his new newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, and his grandson, Col. Robert McCormick, insisted that the Trib spell thru, tho, nite, cigaret, and a number of other simplified spellings, a practice that the newspaper followed, with decreasing regularity, until the 1970s, when it finally abandoned the practice altogether.

Chart of phonetic alphabet from Mott’s Phonology and Phonotype, 1902

Spelling reform still attracts adherents today, some of whom picket the National Spelling Bee to publicize their cause.

Members of the Simplified Spelling Society with nothing better to do picket the National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C.

But despite the fact that most English speakers insist that if they were the boss of English the first thing they’d do something about is our ridiculous spelling system, most of them resolutely ignore spelling reform proposals. Although spelling reform drew sporadic support from scholars, celebrities, and the mildly-deranged, Lincoln surely ignored Rev. Pikard’s phonetic nonsense, though he agreed with Pikard’s position on slavery, a problem in the end that was both more important than spelling, and one that Lincoln could actually did something about once he became president.

Postmarked envelope containing the letter from A. B. Pikard to A Linkon, Esk. Springfeld, Ill.; from the Lincoln papers in the Library of Congress. Although he spelled Lincoln's name phonetically, Pikard may have abbreviated Illinois as Ill instead of the more phonetic Il to ensure that it would be delivered. Or he might simply have been inconsistent.

Pu-lease

chaucer800@aol.com — Mon, 18 May 2009 10:49 AM CDT

There is truly an excuse for everything, isn't there? I teach expository writing at the college level and I teach the process without accepting excuses. And guess what? My students learn! Almost all of them do better and better as the semester progresses. If we start teaching to this new 'disablity,' then the results will be no better than we expect, will they? However, if students don't know they can't learn, they seem to learn very well!

WLD and April fools ...

edmund.aunger@ualberta.ca — Thu, 14 May 2009 12:18 PM CDT

Your article on Written Language Disorder is informative and entertaining, but an April 1st publication date might have been more appropriate. If the pharmaceutical companies ever find out about this new disorder, it may very well spark an explosion of research and publication on potential (and profitable) chemical solutions.

Written Language Disorder: Medical researchers fear there's no cure for bad writing

debaron@uiuc.edu — Wed, 13 May 2009 11:32 PM CDT

A group of Mayo Clinic researchers has found that almost 15 percent of otherwise normal school-aged children in Rochester, Minnesota, are suffering from Written Language Disorder. According to Dr. Slavica K. Katusic, while Written Language Disorder, or WLD, does not pose as great a threat as the H1N1 virus, it’s actually just as common in school children as reading problems, with boys twice as likely as girls to be symptomatic.

Teachers and editors have long suspected that some people write better than others, and critics typically treat writing they don’t like as diseased. But bad writing wasn’t recognized by the medical profession as pathological until 1994, when the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition, defined the syndrome, and psychiatrists suddenly began seeing it in many of their patients.

According to the DSM IV, Written Language Disorder typically involves problems with handwriting (dysgraphia), capitalization and punctuation, spelling, vocabulary, word usage, sentence and paragraph structure, production (inability to write a lot), overall quality, and lack of fluency—but only if such difficulties are not attributable to any other mental or physical conditions.

While there is co-morbidity with other learning syndromes such as reading or mathematics disorder, Written Language Disorder is not to be confused with ADHD, depression, mental retardation, or in the case of nonanglophones, first-language interference. In the Rochester sample population studied by Katusic and her team, 25% of WLD patients have no other disorders or symptoms. They just write poorly.

Bad writing is now a medical condition, according to DSM-IV and researchers at the Mayo Clinic

WLD can be detected as early as the second grade, when otherwise normal children start exhibiting writing skills that are significantly below what can be expected for their age, intelligence, and level of education. Adult onset WLD, which manifests as early as graduate school, tends to be more common in the early tenure-track years and is either a side-effect of giving up cigarettes or the result of blunt-force head trauma.

Until now, the etiology of Written Language Disorder has not been entirely clear. Maslow described a cycle of blame in which employers blamed the poor writing of their employees on bad freshman composition teaching. In turn, college writing teachers blamed writing deficiencies on the high schools, while high schools attributed them to problems with middle schools, kindergarten teachers blamed preschools, and preschools blamed the parents of the 15% of their pre-K children who are literary underachievers.

Now we have medical proof that no one is to blame for bad writing but the writers themselves. It’s not their nurture that causes Written Language Disorder, it’s their nature.

There is currently no pill for WLD. Ritalin and Adderall are known to have adverse effects on syntax and fluency, and while Montana State University researcher Dr. Douglas Downs has had some promising early results with Writealin, high doses of that drug are known to induce hypotaxis in laboratory rats.

Instead, Written Language Disorder is treated symptomatically with a variety of palliative measures, including WLD support groups, called writers’ workshops, which have been popping up ever since articles on Dr. Katusic’s research appeared in Forbes and Reuters, and it’s rumored that Oprah Winfrey is planning to talk with a group of high-functioning Written Language Disorder patients on her popular daytime television show.

Now that the public is becoming more aware of Written Language Disorder, most health plans will agree to pay for approved diagnosis, for example the Test of Written English and the SAT (or ACT with writing), and approved treatments, including transcendental meditation, herbal tea, and syntactic realignment sessions if conducted by certified writing therapists.

Sean Connery, who regularly raises money by holding the Sean’s Kids telethon for the Written Language Disorder Society, takes writing therapists for $200 on an episode of Celebrity Jeopardy

Experience shows that WLD sufferers benefit most from remediation that treats writing as a process. Some medical professionals recommend that WLD children use computers rather than pens or pencils. If that doesn’t work, then scribes may be provided to transcribe the writer’s words (older students and adults can move directly to speech-to-text computer programs, unless they can pay for their own scribe). As a last resort, students might be given preferential seating in the classroom.

With the ban on stem cell research now lifted, researchers hope eventually to develop gene therapies to slow the progress of writing deterioration, if not to halt or reverse it. But that will take years if not decades and unfortunately, for now, the prognosis for WLD sufferers is not good. The website of a leading British psychiatric association offers this pessimistic assessment of long-term survival rates: “Although educators attempt to intervene, there is no proven effective treatment for the disorder of written expression.”

Fox v. FCC: Supreme Court damns fleeting expletives on TV

debaron@uiuc.edu — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 11:50 PM CDT

If you’re in front of a microphone and you feel a fleeting expletive coming on, the Supreme Court says stifle it. In a 5 - 4 decision in FCC v. Fox Television, the Supreme Court ruled that Federal Communication Commission procedures banning dirty words on radio and TV were perfectly appropriate.

Federal law states, “Whoever utters any obscene, indecent, or profane language by means of radio communication shall be fined … or imprisoned not more than two years, or both” (18 U.S.C. § 1464). In 1978 the Supreme Court upheld the FCC’s prohibition of obscenity in the George Carlin “7 Dirty Words” case, barring “language that describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium, sexual or excretory activities or organs, at times of the day when there is a reasonable risk that children may be in the audience.”

Avert your ears: In 1978 the Supreme Court ruled that George Carlin’s 7 dirty words were not ready for prime time, or any other time when children might hear them

But in 2004 the FCC started going after stations not just for repeated obscenity, but also for any single off-hand f-word, for example when Cher said of her critics during a Billboard Music Awards show, “So f*** ‘em,” or when Bono said during the Golden Globes, “This is really, really, f***ing brilliant.” Cable is not covered by the rule, nor are FBI wiretaps, so when Illinois ex-Gov. Blagojevich called his power to sell Pres. Obama’s vacated senate seat “f***ing golden,” his use of an expletive wasn’t illegal, though that proved to be the least of the indicted governor's problems.

The Fox television network sued to protest the ban on fleeting expletives, but after the Court of Appeals sided with Fox, the FCC appealed to the Supreme Court, which reversed the lower court decision. Now the ultra-conservative Fox Network finds itself on the same side as the Court’s liberal and invariably dissenting minority.

The majority of the justices agreed with the FCC’s position that expletives—dirty words used in their nonliteral sense—always invoke that literal meaning. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his majority opinion, “an ‘expletive’s’ power to offend derives from its sexual or excretory meaning.” Scalia added that permitting one-time uses of such words would be only the beginning: “It is surely rational (if not inescapable) to believe that a safe harbor for single words would likely lead to more widespread use of the offensive language.”

Although in his angry dissent in the 1978 7 Dirty Words case Justice William Brennan warned that the majority decision could keep Shakespeare and Chaucer off the air, not to mention the Bible and the Watergate Tapes, in his Fox decision this week Justice Scalia insisted that some intentionally-scripted expletives were fine with him, for example, Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale,” because despite its explicit language, including words the Court banned in 1978, he finds the tale so boring that children wouldn’t notice the salacious parts. Also “Saving Private Ryan,” which Scalia said was so scary and violent that parents wouldn’t let their children watch it in the first place. But the Court was silent on acronyms, so it's not clear whether the FCC could fine broadcasters for the occasional, fleeting WTF.

Justice Scalia himself is already on record as liking a good dirty word now and then. During oral arguments in the Fox case, Justice Stevens asked if f-words were permissible in comedy as well as in the high seriousness of a Spielberg war movie, and Justice Scalia interjected, “Bawdy jokes are okay if they are really good.”

Avert your eyes: Justice Scalia likes a bawdy joke if it’s really good, as long as it’s not on television (and he seems to be okay with obscenity in newspapers)

But when it comes to radio and TV, the Court says dirty words need to be bleeped out, and it notes that fortunately there’s now a technology available to do just that. Big networks already have the equipment, and buying expensive bleeping machines won’t be a problem for small-town broadcasters, because according to Justice Scalia, people from small towns swear less than city slickers like Bono or trash-talking Hollywood women like Cher: “Their down-home local guests probably employ vulgarity less than big-city folks; and small-town stations generally cannot afford or cannot attract foul-mouthed glitteratae from Hollywood.”

In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg argues that expletives do not always invoke literal meaning, citing the Supreme Court decision in Cohen v. California (1971), a case in which a 19 year old was arrested in 1968 for wearing a jacket which read, “Fuck the draft.” The Court interpreted that anti-war message as figurative rather than literal: “Words are often chosen as much for their emotive as their cognitive force. We cannot sanction the view that the Constitution, while solicitous of the cognitive content of individual speech, has little or no regard for that emotive function which, practically speaking, may often be the more important element of the overall message sought to be communicated.”

Perhaps the main concern of the Court’s majority in the Fox decision is to protect the sensitive ears of children. Scalia acknowledges that “the harmful effect of broadcast profanity on children” cannot be verified by empirical studies in which one group of children is exposed to fleeting expletives while a control group is shielded from them. But he is certain that if children hear f-words on TV, they’ll repeat them, because “children mimic the behavior they observe. . . . Programming replete with one-word indecent expletives will tend to produce children who use (at least) one-word indecent expletives.”

Justice Stephen Breyer in his dissent cites a study claiming that children under 12 don’t understand the sexual implications of the profanity that they hear. But what all the justices seem to have missed is the fact that children don’t need to hear obscenity on TV to use it. The dirty words of English were being transmitted intact from generation to generation for centuries before the federal government began licensing and regulating broadcasters. Children have always learned taboo words not from the media, but from slightly older children, and banning expletives from the airwaves isn’t going to slow down that transmission of the juicier parts of our language one bit.

But maybe Justice Scalia realized in the back of his mind that keeping children's vocabularies clean and pure is something neither courts nor parents are very good at, and that the regulation of speech isn't something that the government can effectively dabble in. Because, in addition to supporting the FCC on technical, administrative grounds, his majority opinion also invited a First Amendment challenge to the Commission’s obscenity ban: the “lawfulness [of the FCC’s action] under the Constitution is a separate question to be addressed in a constitutional challenge,” a challenge that could very well come soon if the Fox network doesn’t find the Supreme Court's decision in Fox v. FCC to be fair or balanced.

George Washington, prophet

rhaswell@grandecom.net — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 05:58 AM CDT

I'm delighted to learn that George Washington urged the U. S. to join the League of Nations. Leaders today just aren't as far sighted as they used to be.

Rich Haswell

"In event of moon disaster" and other speeches our presidents never gave

debaron@uiuc.edu — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 11:56 PM CDT

Two days before the first astronauts walked on the moon, H. R. “Watergate Bob” Haldeman directed Nixon speechwriter William Safire to come up with something for the president to say to the astronauts’ widows. Just in case.

Since there’s no wind on the moon, the flag that the astronauts planted on the lunar surface had to be artificially stiffened to give the illusion of waving

When something’s in the offing and politicians have to give a speech about it, they may prepare for different outcomes by having a positive speech in one pocket and a negative speech in the other, just in case.

Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon and returned to earth, and the terse disaster speech entitled “In event of moon disaster” was eventually consigned, along with the rest of the Nixon papers, to the National Archives. A researcher looking for material on Nixon in China accidentally found it there thirty years later, just before the anniversary of the first moon walk.

On July 7, 1999, the Los Angeles Times printed Bill Safire’s alternate memo, which states that the astronauts, unable to return from the moon’s surface to the lunar orbiter, are being left there: “Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace. These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery.” Safire sketched a scenario in which NASA literally pulled the plug, turning off communications with the lunar module while a minister, echoing the traditional burial at sea, commended the astronauts’ souls to “the deepest of the deep.”

An excerpt from Safire’s two-page 1969 memo, with the subject line: In event of moon disaster. In two additional pages, Nixon’s speech writer suggested what the president might say to the widows and sketched a scenario for presenting the news to the American public.

A week after it surfaced, Safire acknowledged his memo in the New York Times. Like everyone who had known of its existence, he was relieved that his scenario had proved unnecessary. But Safire didn’t regret the planning. After all, Ronald Reagan had no “disaster speech” to whip out when the Challenger blew up 17 years after the moon landing.

The moon disaster memo has surfaced again, thanks to journalists who seem to have forgotten its discovery a decade ago and who seem to have forgotten as well that every election day, candidates walk around with an acceptance speech in one pocket and a concession speech in the other.

Despite the Chicago Tribune’s premature headline, Harry Truman didn’t actually have to make his concession speech, but the candidate, who was far behind in the polls during the 1948 presidential campaign, surely had one crumpled up in his pocket as he rode the victory train to Washington on Nov. 3.

Other presidents have had alternative speeches handy as well. George Washington warned against foreign entanglements in his Farewell Address, which was in his waistcoat pocket. But the speech he meant to give, the one that he left in his overcoat, urged the new United States to join the League of Nations.

It was only by sheer luck that John Fitzgerald Kennedy gave one of the most memorable presidential inaugural addresses. In his other pocket were the words to his favorite song, “Camelot,” which he was going to perform as a karaoke number, only it was too cold for him to sing that day.

Jack Kennedy delivering the line, “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” He wanted to sing his favorite song “Camelot” instead, but it was too cold.

And when Bill Clinton testified before the grand jury in 1998, the president had in his other pocket a dictionary which clearly defined what the meaning of the word is is.

Bill Clinton wonders what the meaning of the word is is, even though he had an exact definition of the word is in the alternate testimony that he kept in his other pocket.

Richard Nixon hadn’t always been as well prepared earlier in his career as he was for that Apollo moonshot. When he was accused of graft while running for vice president in 1952, Nixon could only afford one speech, the one in which he defended Pat Nixon’s “respectable Republican cloth coat” and insisted that his family would keep Checkers, the puppy that had been the gift of a Texas supporter. If he had really been taking bribes, Nixon told American television viewers, he would have bought a much better speech.

In 1952, during his run for vice president, Sen. Richard Nixon could only afford one speech, and so what came to be called the “Checkers” speech focused on his modest life style, though it also established the presidential right to take bribes:

I should say this, that Pat doesn't have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat, and I always tell her she would look good in anything. . . . A man down in Texas heard Pat on the radio mention that our two youngsters would like to have a dog, and, believe it or not, the day we left before this campaign trip we got a message from Union Station in Baltimore, saying they had a package for us. We went down to get it. You know what it was? It was a little cocker spaniel dog, in a crate that he had sent all the way from Texas, black and white, spotted, and our little girl Tricia, the six year old, named it Checkers. And you know, the kids, like all kids, loved the dog, and I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we are going to keep it.

In the “Checkers” speech Nixon established the principle that presidents ought to be able to take bribes so long as they could be explained in a way that would bring a tear to the eye. And when Nixon became president in 1968 and began earning serious money on the side, he resolved always to have an extra speech handy so people wouldn’t be able to make fun of him so easily.

When the Watergate scandal broke in 1973, Nixon actively deployed his two-speech strategy, one speech taped secretly in the oval office, the other, very different, speech delivered publicly before television cameras.

An example of one of Richard Nixon’s alternative speeches, this one called “The Smoking Gun,” from the Watergate Tapes, made public by order of the federal appeals court.

The issue of Nixon taking graft resurfaced toward the end of the Watergate investigations, and Nixon addressed this issue head on from the podium at a meeting of the Associated Press managing editors in Orlando: “People have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook.”

But most Americans thought he must have been reading the wrong speech, and one day a researcher in the National Archives may accidentally stumble over the speech that Nixon had in his other pocket in Orlando on Nov. 17, 1993, the one that his speechwriters tersely headed, “I am a crook.”

Nixon tells AP editors meeting in Orlando on Nov. 17, 1993, “I’m not a crook.”

Shakespeare's Birthday is 'Talk Like Shakespeare Day' in Chicago, methinks

debaron@uiuc.edu — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 07:54 PM CDT

Mayor Richard M. Daley, Jr., has proclaimed April 23, William Shakespeare’s 445th birthday, Talk Like Shakespeare Day. Or should that read, “Mayor Richard II hath proclaimed”?

Recent ship hijackings in the Gulf of Aden suggest that this year’s Talk Like a Pirate Day (initially scheduled for Sept. 19) may have to be postponed, and the ousting of ex-Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who likes a good literary quote almost as much as he doth protest his innocence too much, has left a hole in Chicago’s political discourse which Talk Like Shakespeare Day may help to fill.

Talking like Shakespeare, Royal Shakespeare Company veteran Patrick Stewart asks, “B or not a B?" on Sesame Street

The Chicago Shakespeare Theater has gotten behind this event with a web page full of talk like Shakespeare resources:

a list of words that Shakespeare seems to have coined

some favorite Shakespeare quotes (among them, the play’s the thing; what’s in a name? Alas, poor Yorick; and brave new world);

Shakespeare video clips (no, the Bard didn’t make videos, but other people like the Beatles and Patrick Stewart have, or as Shakespeare might have put it, have done);

a utility that will translate your Twitter messages into Shakespearean tweets

and even a mask, so you can look like Shakespeare while you talk like him.

You can talk like Shakespeare on Talk Like Shakespeare Day, and you can look like him as well, by printing and then cutting out this mask (not masque – that’s something else).

Mayor Daley wants Chicago’s school children to use words like prithee, thou, fie, and knave “to celebrate the legacy of his language.” Shakespeare may have been the first writer to use the contraction prithee, at least in print, but the full phrase I pray thee went back to the 1300s. Fie, according to the OED, was an onomatopoetic word referring to a bad smell. Knave meant ‘a young boy,’ ‘a servant,’ and ‘a rogue’ in Shakespeare’s time. And thou, thee, thy and thine were second-person singular pronouns already giving way to the modern you, your, and yours.

Although people will strut around the Loop on April 23 mouthing Shakespearean words like climature and languageless, and peppering their conversations with quotes from the plays, like Ay, there’s the rub, Et tu, Brute, and Lay on, Macduff, the problem with Talk Like Shakespeare Day is that nobody knows what Shakespeare actually talked like.

We know what the characters in Shakespeare’s plays said, but nobody talked like that in real life. Sure, people used words like methinks, and meseems. They said abroach, misdemean, and ratherest. The pronoun its was an innovation just starting to appear in Shakespeare’s day (sort of like you guys as an innovation in the past 20 years; before its people said it, without an s, or sometimes his). But they probably didn’t go around myching mallico (making mischief), leaning toward the nayward (leaning toward denial, disbelief), or accusing liars of not being oathable (trustworthy). And they certainly didn’t use blank verse in ordinary conversation.

Shakespeare wrote some 28,000 different words in his plays (in contrast, the King James Bible, published in 1611, has about 8,000 different words, and the average American high school graduate has a vocabulary of 40,000 – 75,000 words – to paraphrase Bill Clinton, the actual numbers in these word counts depend on what the meaning of the word word is). And while some writers have Shakespeare coining as many as 1,500 – 1,700 words, the Folger Shakespeare Library credits him with a little over 500, and the OED lists Shakespeare as the first cited author for 247 words, ranging from airless and puppy dog to pleached ‘fenced with interwoven boughs’ and quatch, which could mean something like ‘plump,’ although that's a little uncertain since no one seems to have used the word quatch after Shakespeare did (until just now, that is).

When Shakespeare went to the bank he wasn’t all, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be, For loan oft loses both itself and friend,” which is what Polonius tells his son Laertes in Hamlet, instead of writing him a check. And when Shakespeare told a friend about a real shipping disaster he probably didn’t call it “a ship of rich lading wrecked on the narrow seas,” the words with which he describes Antonio’s bad fortune in The Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare surely didn’t copy the words of the sleepwalking Lady Macbeth and the doctor observing her from any consultation in the office of his own GP:

Lady Macbeth. Here's the smell of the blood still: all the

perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little

hand. Oh, oh, oh!

. . . .

Doctor. Foul whisperings are abroad: unnatural deeds

Do breed unnatural troubles: infected minds

To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets:

More needs she the divine than the physician.

God, God forgive us all! Look after her;

Remove from her the means of all annoyance,

And still keep eyes upon her. So, good night:

My mind she has mated, and amazed my sight.

I think, but dare not speak.

17th-century patients, like today's, said the equivalent of, "It hurts me here, doc." 17th-century physicians, like today's, didn’t like to admit they were stumped. And of course there's the whole doctor-patient confidentiality thing.

We can’t be sure what Shakespeare spoke like when he was offstage because no one back then had the technology to capture everyday language and preserve it. Despite Mayor Daley’s best intentions, talking like Shakespeare requires more than peppering our conversation with an occasional thee, varlet or zounds, and despite throwing in a “Get thee to a nunnery” or “For this relief much thanks,” no one will ever know if they’re really talking like Shakespeare.

But that’s OK, because, if Shakespeare were alive today in Chicago, he himself wouldn’t be talking like Shakespeare – well, he would be talking like Shakespeare, just not like the stereotype we have of the renaissance playwright. Instead, the Bard would be channeling Mayor Daley, or at least, if he were reincarnated as a playwright (though more likely he’d be a YouTube videographer), he’d base his dialogue on the words of da mair, even though characters in plays still don’t talk onstage the same way they do when they’re in the audience, at home, at the doctor’s office, or like a lot of Illinois politicians, in jail.

Using age-regression software, an artist with London's Metropolitan Police created an image showing that at 14 the Bard may have looked a lot like Harry Potter.

, , and especially : Proposed Cybersecurity Act gives president power to unplug the internet

debaron@uiuc.edu — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 11:53 AM CDT

On April 1 (that date may be no accident), Sen. Jay Rockefeller and his co-sponsors introduced the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 (S.B. 773) with companion legislation creating the office of Cybersecurity Advisor to the president (S.B. 778).

One blogger warns that if these bills pass, the president will have the authority to unplug the internet and federalize private computer networks.

The Washington Post account is similarly breathless: "Addressing what intelligence officials describe as a gaping vulnerability, the legislation also calls for the appointment of a White House cybersecurity 'czar' with unprecedented authority to shut down computer networks, including private ones, if a cyberattack is underway."

But before FoxNews cries “Socialism” yet again and starts dumping sacks of silicon chips alongside those millions of wasted tax-day teabags (do these superpatriots even know what teabagging means to a hard-core socialist?), it might be useful to actually look at the legislation in question, which won’t bring us any closer to 1984.

Responding to the attacks of 9/11, the USA Patriot Act authorizes warrantless surveillance of our digital activity, and some attorneys general might see that as permission for the occasional waterboarding of systems administrators. But the Cybersecurity Act, which anticipates a devastating attack on the nation’s digital resources, seeks to avert such an attack while preserving the right to privacy and protecting our civil liberties.

The bill creates a Cybersecurity Board to oversee the development of security standards for government computers, create scholarships for computer science students working on security issues, and encourage a broader awareness of digital security among businesses and the general public. And it authorizes the president to appoint a Cybersecurity Advisor to – think about it – advise the president on the best way to protect the nation’s critical networks.

Unlike the USA Patriot Act, which mentions the need to protect civil liberties twice in its 402 pages but doesn’t really mean it, the Cybersecurity Act seeks to placate fears that all our domains are belong to .gov by explicitly linking internet security with the preservation of civil liberties:

All actions and decisions of the proposed Cybersecurity Board “must respect privacy and civil liberties.”

The Board is charged with determining whether the national cybersecurity policy adequately addresses “societal and civil liberty concerns.”

And the Secretary of Commerce is charged with developing an awareness campaign that “communicates the Federal Government’s role in securing the Internet and protecting privacy and civil liberties with respect to Internet-related activities.”

The Cybersecurity Act won’t put the U.S. on a par with the 13 countries labeled “internet enemies” by Reporters sans frontières, including Myanmar, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Vietnam. The Cyberczar won’t field internet police squads like China and Turkey to imprison bloggers or block websites that might not follow the party line. Nor can the Office of Cybersecurity shut down the nation’s computers on a whim the way Myanmar does, keep the internet out entirely, like North Korea, or severely limit online access like Cuba, whose communications minister called the internet a “tool for global extermination” in 2007.

Furthermore, at the same time that the bill charges the security office with developing ways “to determine the origin of a message transmitted over the Internet,” the kind of big-brotherism sure to alarm the Twittersphere, it enjoins the Cyberczar to consider “how to support privacy in conjunction with improved security.”

But what’s worrying internet freedom fighters most is this little clause, which empowers not the Cyberczar but the president to unplug the internet:

The president “may order the disconnection of any Federal Government or United States critical infrastructure information systems or networks in the interest of national security.”

The president is never very far from a briefcase with the nuclear launch codes and the red telephone. He can get the Russian president on the horn in thirty seconds or blow up the world in the interests of national security. But to the most paranoid among us, the Cybersecurity Act makes possible a Dr. Strangelove scenario where the president yanks us offline in the middle of a chat session, and some people think that’s just a little too much.

It’s one thing to have the launch codes, but should the president have your url as well?

Because, according to the law, it’s not just federal computers that can be booted offline, but also “United States critical infrastructure information systems or networks.” Presumably these are the networks run by banks and financial institutions, hospitals, police departments, and hedge fund managers. But they could also include university networks, where students are harmlessly Facebooking. And in a big enough emergency the president could even take down the food network, or Amazon.com. The interests of national security can be that compelling.

Fortunately the president likely to sign this legislation if it passes is Barack Obama, and we know he loves his BlackBerry and his laptop. Even if he’s forced to take some networks offline in an emergency, Pres. Obama’s not going to power down the national grid, because he knows our survival depends on our connectivity, and because the internet itself is designed to self-repair, continuing to function even when key nodes go offline. And no doubt David Plouffe will be reminding the president how important it is to keep on texting even when the numbers look bad, and his daughters will be pressuring him to get Facebook up and running as soon as possible.

But any cybersecurity law has to provide for less tech-savvy presidents as well, for those who might think of the internet as a series of tubes, or worse yet, those who think that if you can’t find something on Wikipedia, then either it didn’t happen or it’s not important enough to pursue.

So it wouldn’t hurt to make the presidential power to take networks offline both more specific, say to protect the nation’s defenses as well as its governmental, financial, and transportation networks, and more realistic: the internet is so complex and so borderless that, unless you live in Cuba or Myanmar, there is no single switch to shut it down.

The Cybersecurity Act may turn out to be moot, after all, since the National Security Agency has announced that it wants the job of protecting government networks for itself, and in pursuing that goal the NSA hasn't been as scrupulous about preserving the privacy or civil liberties of ordinary citizens as Congress or the courts.

So as long as we’re revising the Cybersecurity Act, it wouldn’t hurt to mention one last time just how critical it is to preserve civil liberties both online and off in wartime as well as peacetime.

"Text 'M' for murder": The classics meet the digital age

debaron@uiuc.edu — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 06:50 PM CDT

Matt Richtel writes in the New York Times that the mobile phone has thrown a wrench into literary plotting. Thanks to digital technology, a simple text message would tell Romeo – spoiler alert – that Juliet was only sleeping. Rick would know right away that Ilsa was running late. And Kevin’s parents would discover that he was home, alone.

If Richtel’s complaint is true, then mobile telephony means no more star-crossed lovers, missed connections, or lost children, and no remakes of some movie greats. If Ray Milland wants to murder his wife, a phone call won’t bring her to the writing desk, where the killer waits behind a curtain, since her cell phone is probably on her nightstand. Want Shane to return? Just press 5 to leave your callback number. Want to know what Rosebud means? Google it.

Capt. Lesgate, also known as Swann, pops out from behind a curtain to after an unsuspecting Grace Kelly. How do you remake Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 classic, “Dial M for Murder,” in a world without land lines?

Richtel argues that some of today's writers feel more comfortable writing historical fiction because a lot of older technology worked so slowly that it was useless for advancing plot. But for anything set in the present, the fact of all-email-texts-and-internet, all-the-time, means that characters are never out of touch and information is just a click away: Deborah Kerr can text Cary Grant from the E.R.; Gilligan can google.map his way off the island; and Scarlett O’Hara can take the “Which Civil War general are you?” Facebook quiz tomorrow.

Occasionally an old story upgrades easily, like Pride and Prejudice 2.0, or as the author now calls it, austenbook:

There are no cell phones in Harry Potter, where only magic, not technology, can be trusted (true, Dudley has computers, but like a true Muggle, he’s always breaking them). But for most stories set in the here-and-now, traditional plot devices like missed connections or stranding on a desert island only succeed when a digital technology conveniently fails. Just as the heroes of the old horse operas had to throw their guns at the bad guys when they ran out of bullets, today’s protagonists must cope with a less dramatic but more literal deus ex machina: lo batt, denial of service attacks, and “404 File Not Found” messages.

Harrison Ford, as Pres. Jim Marshall in “Air Force One” (1997), experiences Lo Batt while getting instructions from the ground on how to retake his plane from hijackers.

For example, suspense builds in “Air Force One” when Harrison Ford’s phone battery goes dead, and “Slumdog Millionaire” works in part because a cell phone gets left in a car.

Richtel’s surely overstating his case against technology, since many contemporary stories (and pretty much all science fiction) incorporate the digital world seamlessly, if not always realistically. No office scene in police procedural or on TV is complete without a PC on the desk. The cell phones on “Law and Order” and “The West Wing” never go dead, never drop a call, always have full bars. Whether it’s “CSI” or “The Closer,” crime techs can always crack passwords, and their version of Photoshop always enlarges grainy surveillance footage into hi-res images where license plates are legible and perps look just like their 8 x 10 glossy head shots.

Not only do today’s writers take the challenges of technology in stride, if yesterday’s authors were working today they’d also adjust their plots to fit the present without missing a beat. Take Homer, for example. Richtel predicts an easy, Circe-free return from Troy to Ithaka thanks to google.maps. But no smartphone would keep Odysseus from getting delayed at Athens airport (ATH) on his way back to Kefalonia (EFL; there’s no airport in Ithaka, but there's a daily bus from Kefalonia to Ithaka, which can be found at http://www.kefalonia-ithaka.com/itaka.php); he’d have no trouble programming an avatar to fool his friends when he did get back to town; and he’d prove his true identity to Penelope by reminding her how much trouble he had assembling that bed from Ikea before he left for Troy.

As far as upgrading “Dial ‘M’ for Murder” to the age of text, that’s simple. Tony finds his old pal Swann, fallen on hard times, spoiler alert, through classmates.com, then responds to Swann’s used-car ad on Craig’s list. Tony lures his wife Margot out of the bedroom with a text message asking her to TiVo a program because he’s delayed at the club, and while not everything in the remake needs to be digital, Margot turns the tables on Swann, who comes out from behind the very traditional curtains to strangle her, by killing him, not with a scissors from her mending box, but with an antique letter-opener that she got for Tony as a surprise birthday present on eBay.

After Margot’s conviction for murder and just before her impending execution, Margot’s “partner” Mark Halliday (played by an ageless Robert Cummings) finds the payoff money hidden not in Tony’s suitcase but in his PayPal account. And in a typical, Hitchcockian turn of fate, Chief Inspector Hubbard independently tumbles to Tony’s guilt when a password, written on a slip of paper in what turns out to be Tony’s overcoat, not his own, won’t unlock Tony’s computer screen.

A case of mixed-up passwords proves the downfall of Tony Wendice in the 2009 remake called “Text ‘M’ for Murder.”

Ace Fowlerian admits he can't type

pbpub@bigpond.com — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 01:53 AM CDT

I am embarrassed to see that I made two typing mistakes in my little story, "Fowlerism" on your site. Please fix them like this:

1. Please replace the sentence beginning "mot juste" with this correctly copied one: "mot juste is an expression which readers would like to buy of writers who use it, as one buys one’s neighbour’s bantam cock for the sake of hearing its voice no more."

2. Please replace the Mrs Malaprop piece with this one, correctly typed: ""She [Mrs Malaprop] is now the matron saint of all those who go wordfowling with a blunderbuss."

The Elements of Style turns 50. If you're celebrating, make sure to use the active voice

debaron@uiuc.edu — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 11:55 PM CDT

April, 2009, is the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Elements of Style, a book first written and published privately in 1918 by William Strunk for his composition students at Cornell, but revised and reintroduced to the world by E. B. White half a century ago.

White took English 8 from Strunk in 1919. He then forgot about his freshman composition course, and its textbook, until 1957, when a friend sent him a copy of The Elements of Style that he had stolen from the Cornell library. White wrote about the purloined book in the New Yorker (“Letter from the East,” July 27, 1957, pp. 35-36; 41- 45), but he apparently didn’t return it to Cornell. Instead, he revised it (Strunk had died in 1946), added an introductory essay, and republished The Elements of Style in 1959. It immediately became a best-seller, and its four editions have sold more than ten million copies.

Strunk’s “little book” took a reductive approach to writing, with 8 rules of usage, 10 principles of composition, and a list of frequently misused words. According to White, Strunk’s goal was to write the “rules and principles [of English] on the head of a pin” (the first Elements of Style actually ran 43 pages, too big for a pinhead, but short for a work of its kind).

No one can really shrink the rules for writers down to an easily-swallowed pill, a 43-page essay, or even a long, rambling tome, and hope to be successful, because writing doesn’t respond well to formulas, and no set of rules can anticipate the situations writers have to deal with daily. But true to the spirit of brevity that writing teachers often extol, Strunk’s Rule 13 states, “Omit needless words,” and that’s pretty much what he did: Strunk wrote only one other book, a 73-page study of English meter.

Rule 13 from the 1918 edition of The Elements of Style

Ignoring Rule 13, White described his eccentric teacher, “his eyes blinking incessantly behind steel-rimmed spectacles as though he had just emerged into strong light, his lips nibbling each other like nervous horses, his smile shuttling to and fro in a carefully edged mustache.”

A photograph of William Strunk, emerging into a strong light, squinting at the studentry. White’s caricature of his teacher is kinder than how most students describe eccentric teachers.

But unlike his pupil, Strunk usually followed his own rules, and since he made each of his words tell, White remembers that to fill each hour Strunk said every sentence three times:

Strunk’s rules, like those of other language law-givers, assume that writers use too many words to say too little. Like Henry Fowler and George Orwell, Strunk calls for language that is direct, assertive, and active. Rule 12 states, “Make definite assertions,” though the rule may be needlessly long, since assertions suggest a certain amount of definiteness to begin with.

Rule 10 states simply, “Use the active voice.” The book says it once, though Strunk, turning rule into incantation, probably said it three times in class:

Strunk recognized there was a place for the passive, and he even used the passive to talk about it:

Though Henry Fowler doesn’t favor one voice over the other in his Dictionary of Modern English Usage, George Orwell is even more assertive than Strunk in praising the active voice. In “Politics and the English Language” (1946), Orwell calls the passive one of the “swindles and perversions” of modern writing, though he uses an agentless passive to condemn the construction: “The passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active.”

Orwell uses passives because rule-givers typically break their own rules. Sometimes Strunk broke rules too, championing the needless word studentry, which he favored over student body. There are two citations for studentry in the OED, but speakers of English invariably prefer students or student body as the general term.

Strunk knew that good writers strayed from the rules, but like most rule-makers he was convinced that rules had to be mastered before they could be broken, and that even then they could only be broken for good reason. But that’s not how writers work. We don’t memorize a set of rules and then ignore them once we’ve passed the test. Instead, we hack away, sometimes using too many words, sometimes too few. We learn to trust our ear, not our textbook. We use the voice that sounds right, and the idiom, both while we’re learning and later, after we’ve turned pro.

Even White admits this. In an introduction to a 1977 reprint of his New Yorker essay on Strunk, White reveals his discomfort with the role of rule-giver: "I felt uneasy at posing as an expert on rhetoric, when the truth is I write by ear, always with difficulty and seldom with any exact notion of what is taking place under the hood." That is how we all write.

E. B. White is acknowledged to be a pretty good writer. That’s because he didn’t follow the rules that he and his mentor, Will Strunk, laid down in The Elements of Style. It’s fine to read that book, and to celebrate its anniversary. But no rule book or just-add-water instant prose recipe can substitute for the trial and error, the variety and experiment, the exactness and the uncertainty, the occasional success and the many failures, that writers face every day if we’re doing our job right.

An M.A. in Facebook: now you can earn academic credit for doing what you normally do to avoid schoolwork

debaron@uiuc.edu — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 10:52 PM CDT

Birmingham City University, in England, is offering a Masters degree in Facebook and Twitter. Students can now pay £4000 (about $6000) to earn credit for doing what they normally do to avoid schoolwork.

Birmingham City University's YouTube video introducing its new MA in Social Media

While the British government spies on Facebook, and British scientists remain intent on proving that Facebook causes autism, British academics are busily theorizing social network sites, studying a wildly popular phenomenon through the impenetrable jargon of cultural studies, the kind of language that no one on Facebook or Twitter would ever use.

But it’s not all interrogating heteronormative hermeneutics all the time at Birmingham City U. In addition to theory, students in the program will be offered “access to a peer group and active community of social media practitioners.” Which is theory-speak for saying that the students and faculty at BCU are addicted to Facebook and Twitter.

Of course, students and faculty everywhere are addicted to Facebook and Twitter, but the folks at BCU are so heavily into social networking that when the Guardian and the Telegraph quoted a student who criticized the new Facebook M.A. for teaching students to do what they already know how to do, faculty defended the course in a series of tweets on Twitter and posts on their walls.

The Facebook M.A. is a one-year program. Students take a set of how-to courses where they can pretend to watch Powerpoint presentations about Facebook and Bebo, a popular British social networking site, while surreptitiously reading Shakespeare on their laptops. After formal coursework they move on to “a substantial piece of independent study” in order to create “a social media production project” – they make a Facebook page at home – together with “an original piece of research in the form of a 15000-word dissertation.” At 140 characters a pop, and an average of five characters per word, that dissertation should consist of about 536 separate tweets.

You may be wondering what kind of job a Facebook M.A. prepares a student for. According to the school’s web site, graduates can “become a social media consultant (and understand what that means)” as well as “contribute to the development of the social media industry.”

YouTube video explains what you can do with an MA in Social Media

But you don’t have to take a course to know what “social media consultant” means. A Google search suggests that social media consultants help businesses set up blogs, and one social media consultant warns that many of his colleagues don’t really know what they’re doing. Plus, blogs, Facebook pages, and tweets are all essentially do-it-yourself projects, so it’s not clear that many people are eager to pay either certified or self-appointed consultants to provide these services for them.

In the event that jobs for Birmingham grads are hard to come by, the Facebook M.A. also prepares students to “continue to develop a scholarly interest in social media as part of a further research degree.” In other words, Birmingham City primes its graduates to do what unemployed B.A.s and M.A.s are doing the world over: ride out the recession by going back to school for a Ph.D.

Maybe the economy will turn around after another 10,000 tweets, and employers will start hiring again. But even if that doesn't happen, with all their experience writing 140-character tweets and 132-character text messages, students could always earn their daily bowl of rice by ghost-writing haiku for Zen masters too busy consulting to write their own.

Letter from London: Brits fear Facebook friends are really bombers

debaron@uiuc.edu — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 10:06 PM CDT

The British Government thinks some of your Facebook friends and friends of friends may actually be terrorists, so it wants to monitor the nation's 27 million Facebook, MySpace, and Bebo users to prevent further attacks like the London tube and bus bombings of July 7, 2005, and Guy Fawkes' attack on Parliament, in 1605.

Britons are used to being watched. After decades of IRA violence, her Majesty's crime fighters set up thousands of closed-circuit TV cameras to monitor the behavior of ordinary British citizens as they go about their daily chores. After 07/07, the government also began to compile a massive DNA database of UK residents, and it supports a European Union plan to record all email and internet activity in the 27 member states.

Big Brother already watches Londoners as they go about their daily tasks, so why not also watch their Facebooking?

But Prime Minister Gordon Brown's new proposal to have the government friend your friends outdoes the slavish imitation of the Bush-Cheney war on civil liberties of his predecessor, Tony Blair. Facebook has already been accused in Parliament of causing autism, hyperactivity, cancer, and even death. Now Home Office Minister Vernon Coaker wants to revise the government's "intercept modernisation programme" – that's newspeak for more spying – to force social networking sites to turn over information on their users' friends networks. Opposition Liberal Democrats are charging that the government's revision of the Post Office "I Spy" Bill is one more terrifying, costly, and extremely leaky example of the big brotherism that has become rampant in this country since the July 7 bombings.

A sign at a bus stop across from Parliament, along with new government proposals to restrict civil liberties – two indicators that even in the age of Obama, the Bush Doctrine still rules on this side of the pond

Defending the government's latest invasion of British privacy, the Home Office said, "The communications revolution has been rapid in this country and the way in which we collect communications data needs to change so law enforcement agencies can maintain their ability to tackle terrorism." But as opposition MPs pointed out in the House of Commons, the government has already spent massive amounts of money on communication intercepts with little or no results, and lax government computer security has already resulted in the loss of hundreds of Whitehall laptops, disks, and flash drives, containing vital personal data on millions of Britons.

Demonstrating outside 10 Downing Street, Liberal Democrat MPs are monitoring the whereabouts of Prime Minister Gordon Brown just as he seeks to monitor everyone else's behavior

True, putting a Big Brother icon on everybody's laptop will cost taxpayers more money and expose even more private data to theft. Fortunately, all this can be avoided. What both the government and the opposition have failed to realize is that, if half the British population is on Facebook, then it would be both simpler and more cost effective to discontinue internet surveillance, label anyone with a logon all as a potential bomber, and go have a nice cup of tea.

The long tradition of social welfare that often seems to accompany such a massive invasion of privacy might then prompt the government to compensate those who are inconvenienced by the new policy, perhaps by opening up special "terrorists only" lanes for Facebookers on the motorways or designating certain seats on the underground and the buses for "friends and friends of friends of bombers" during peak travel times.

For off-peak travel, public service announcements could warn, "There's a fifty percent chance that if you friend the person texting next to you, you'll be friending a terrorist or the friend of a terrorist," just as they now announce service disruptions on the Piccadilly Line or warn passengers to report any unattended packages to the authorities.

All this suspicion is unlikely to turn up any new gunpowder plots. But since we already assume that anyone attempting to board a plane while wearing shoes is a terrorist, why not go that extra step and also assume that all our Facebook friends are busy trying to figure out how to send a digital bomb to blow us up?

Off with their heads! Under a new government scheme, half the British population, all Facebook users, their friends, and their friends of friends, will be escorted to the Tower of London, where they will assist London's Metropolitan Police in their inquiries

Yet another inventor of the telephone

seamstress@web.de — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 04:00 PM CDT

What about Johann Philipp Reis then? You guessed it, I am German.

Wikipedia has it as follows:

Credit for inventing the electric telephone remains in dispute. Charles Bourseul, Antonio Meucci, Johann Philipp Reis, Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray, amongst others, have all been credited with the invention. The early history of the telephone is a confusing morass of claim and counterclaim, which was not clarified by the huge mass of lawsuits which hoped to resolve the patent claims of individuals. The Bell and Edison patents, however were forensically victorious and commercially decisive.

Self-educating in the courtroom

cpn004@yahoo.com — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 12:36 PM CDT

In one sense, I agree. In another I don't. Most of us, when we're ill, we go see a doctor, a specialist in diagnosing illness. We might do our own research, but still we rely on the doctor for an informed opinion on what we've found. However, if we reject the doctor's advice, we affect only ourselves. Even so, we cannot legally self-medicate, at least with prescription drugs. Not even well-informed doctors are supposed to self-medicate. However, in the case of a courtroom, our rejection (or non-notifying) of informed law specialists leaves us without an expert-informed opinion on our research and it affects others besides ourselves.