I'm having a hard time articulating why it's different at home than on the road, perhaps because getting back to work after such a long trip is hard, and I'm in the articulating biz. We went to Mexico full of intentions to journal, catalog, and photograph, but virtually the only thing we managed to do on a regular basis was take a picture of ourselves every day, and even that resolve began to slip and slide. I love being free from the compulsion to record and analyze; a friend once accused me of having a "hoarding disease," but that was a long time ago, when my main relationship was with my typewriter. Even in the plaint humdrumness of my regular life, I feel guilty for not recording more. One of my history professors, Maurice Isserman, declared to our senior seminar that he, too, had written a lot about his life but then discarded it because he wanted to live, not write. He said it so blithely, more as a judgment on our own commitments than an objective statement of his, that I was shocked and affronted. While I sometimes feel I'm on the verge of such pronouncements, I won't go so far; the tension is so familiar as to be banal (and here I sit, writing and multiplying the banality) but it's real and, for all its warts, something I have a relationship with.

In the last 300 miles of our roadtrip, Misty and I amused ourselves by composing short songs about robots, one of which went like this:

Beep beep, beep beep
Yeah!
Beep beep, beep beep
Yeah!
Robots walking on the moon
Robots walking on the moon
(repeat)

The goal was to come up with 20 songs between Alice and Austin, but we failed. Not that inventing songs with seven words total is so hard, but when they're so catchy you have to sing them over and over and over. That's why we only have 12 songs to show.

In this report in Inside Higher Ed, Scott Jaschik describes an MLA panel on redirecting foreign language higher ed away from the study of literature toward the study of culture, politics, and more (how should one put this?) mundane yet practical texts.

Nearly everyone I speak with about language study at the intersection of national security says the same thing, and have been saying the same thing for a long time. They also complain that academics, from professors to department chairs to deans, have obstructed such a shift, mainly out of political fears of (as Mary Louise Pratt was quoted in Jaschik's article) the "securitization of language study."

One problem with such a narrow view (Pratt may or may not hold the view; that's not my point) is that it's not just the military and intelligence agencies suffering a shortage of language professionals; it's also education (which needs teachers) and the court and medical systems (which need interpreters). Liberal academics should actually get behind the professionalization of language study because it's one good way to ensure that Americans and visitors receive equal access to legal justice and adequate health care. This was my argument in a New Republic piece last year about why a stronger language czar was needed than pending legislation would create.

Domna Stanton, president of the MLA, responded with this:

Michael Erard suggests that the United States create a language czar who can "put in place a national language strategy to take us through the next 50 years" ("Tongue Tied," October 24). As president of the Modern Language Association (MLA), which promotes the study and teaching of languages and literatures--with 30,000 members in 100 countries--I take issue with the notion that language is best viewed as a "commodity" to be handled by an office in Washington, D.C., rather than as an integral part of our nation's educational institutions and pursuits. The study and use of language are crucial to our country's strength and well-being in areas that range from the cultural and historical, to the economic and technical, to the military and scientific. The best way to nurture and promote language learning is not, as Erard suggests, by creating a centralized language bureaucracy, hampered by overregulation. Instead, we ought to channel more federal, state, and local resources to support and expand ongoing programs at schools and universities across the nation that provide thoughtful and comprehensive language study to a wide range of students. To this end, the MLA supports an educational language policy that encourages the study of foreign languages here at home at every academic level and engenders greater public awareness of the importance of understanding other cultures and languages to our profound and diverse national and international interests. Language study that both allows one to read Proust "in the original" and serves the needs of national security is surely a good thing. If we do both with excellence, our nation will be the richer for it.

This is how I responded:

The problem with Domna C. Stanton's solution is that it's more of the same: If the schools and universities she touts are so successful, then why do we have a shortage of language workers? We do need a language czar: to solve immediate crises (such as the shortage of Chinese teachers described in my article) in ways that fit into a long-term strategy; to fight for language program budgets in peacetime; and to ensure that hospitals, schools, and courts--not just the National Security Agency and the FBI--are adequately staffed with language experts. We don't need a language czar who will merely make more language speakers; we need more language workers, which requires rethinking what we teach and why. I understand the logic that makes the MLA bridle at the word "commodity," but I used the term to point out that the cultural value of language is always linked to social prestige, human capital, economic competitiveness, and jobs--in other words, an economic value. That's where addressing America's language issues should begin.

Two more points: One, the resisters should provide tools to the students, then let them decide how they're going to use them, instead of infantilizing young minds. Second, even literary study has been "securitized," in the sense that the study of American literature is mostly the study of writing in English, the hegemonic language of the expansionist state apparatus. This is Werner Sollors' argument, which he makes with much piquance in The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature.

I've been circulating a proposal to create a language beat at a newspaper or a magazine, a staff (or superstringer) position dedicated to writing stories about language. The idea is outside the box, or between boxes -- the stories don't necessarily fall in one section. So sometimes they'd be education, at other times business, at other times entertainment.

The basic idea is that language is a beat as much as business or health or education are. It requires knowledge of the topic and a host of sources across a wide ranging group of disciplines and institutions. Unfortunately, most reporters bring to their language reporting the same biases, ideologies, and myths that most in their audiences have. As a result, narrow ideas about language get reinforced. Even more dramatically, there are opportunities to do amazing writing, storytelling, and reporting that get missed. Not that I want more competition in this area, but my goal is to advance the discourse about language in the US -- to give people new ways to talk about language as a structure, as a commodity, and as a building block of identity.

Here's the proposal:

Goal: A language beat

I want to create a language-focused beat at a newspaper or magazine, to write feature stories at the intersection of language and business, law, policy, technology, business, entertainment, and science. Language is a more prominent topic of everyday concern and conversation because of global economics, shifting US demographics, new science and technologies, immigration, and the war on terror. A new census only 3 years away will depict, again, an increasingly multilingual landscape. Most of all, language lends itself to good storytelling, with interesting characters who right now are shaping the ways Americans talk, read, and think about themselves in terms of language.

However, no outlets have a language beat. Only a few newspapers have language columnists, but these are mavens and grammarians, not journalists who can break news. Readers can get language commentary on blogs (some of which are very good), but no reporting or storytelling. And language is, in fact, a beat: there are experts and literature to know, a range of subareas to follow. Writing language stories requires experience and expertise that general assignment reporters (who write most language-related stories) do not possess, leading to missed opportunities to break stories, infelicities of facts, and overlooking key sources and perspectives. Such a beat also lends itself to new media: People love to hear other people's voices, especially when they speak differently (e.g., podcasts of people saying commonly accepted words that used to be obscene), and various types of language data make for compelling graphics.

If you want to hear more, get in touch.

If you think about it, the speech balloon is an odd convention, and this site tells how the convention evolved from banners and flags in the Renaissance to the current bubble or balloon.

Interestingly, Aztec codices contain similar shapes, called "speech scrolls," that appear near the mouths of figures said to be speaking. Words or sounds aren't represented in the scrolls themselves; they are simply meant to represent that someone was speaking. This convention is reiterated in contemporary Mexican design, notably in fire emergency signs, where the stick figures spreading an alarm of "Fire!" (or "Incendio!") have speech scrolls coming from their mouths. I'll post a picture when I can find one.

This review of a delightful graphic novel, Shenzen, never made it into the magazine that assigned it:

In Shenzen, Guy Delisle introduces a new Kafkesque anti-hero for the globalized age: a company rep sent abroad to manage subcontractors. Boredom ensues – as do daily comedies over food and customs and strange English, and did we mention the boredom? In 1997 Delisle spent three months in China, in the industrial city of Shenzen (where else?) overseeing animators of a French cartoon series, Papyrus. He turns his eye to the absurdities of his alienation as well as those of the people he meets, and he slyly fools around drawing Chinese characters by turning them into visual gibberish – so the reader can share his experience of not being able to read or speak. And boredom? “In a comic book it turns out to be funny, because the reader can turn the page,” Delisle says. The French artist is perhaps better known for Pyongyang, his graphic novel based on a bad time in another Asian country, so fans will enjoy Shenzen, which was published earlier, in French in 2000, and appears now in English for the first time. Delisle is now working on a book about a year living in Burma. “If I had had a really good time in Shenzen, going to parties, I don’t think I would have done a book about it,” he says.

This just up at Design Observer:

I spent years learning to diagram sentences from Catholic nuns, a biographical fact I share with Kitty Burns Florey, who explains the history of sentence diagramming as well as its appeal in her new book, Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences, just published by the upstarts at Melville House.

For Florey, diagramming was an experience with grammar that spoke to her nascent copyeditor. I liked diagramming sentences for a distinctly different reason: it's kind of kinky.

Raised by a strange breed of faithful Catholics, I was often taught various methods of mortification, of the flesh and of the mind, at school and at home, and in religious education classes. You fast; you kneel; you suffer the pangs of lust. For Lent, you give up candy or you wear hair shirts. If I was ill, my father would come to my bedside and remind me quietly that when you're sick you're closer to God, so I should spend my time in bed reflecting and praying. Complaints, inconveniences, or affliction were to be "offered up to God" — that is, made into your own mini Calvary. In fifth grade I caught a case of piousness so severe I thought child sainthood was a plausible career choice.

Like the flesh, language was unruly. It wriggled. Even the order of well-formed sentences seemed impishly temporary, as if the words would fall out of line as soon as you turned your back. Language was the vehicle of sin: the snake seduced Eve; Judas betrayed Jesus. I cussed, then spent the day licking the pasty bits of Irish Spring from my molars, if my mother had happened to hear. The language of Jesus was powerful, too: it cast out demons, raised men from the dead, chastised moneylenders. But ordinary language had to be subdued. So diagramming a sentence was one way of mortifying language, torturing it as only Catholics could do. To diagram, you pinned the parts of a sentence to a geometry of lines, some flat, some slanting, others stepped. You tied language, symbolically and literally, to a cross.

Diagramming evolved from its first iteration in 1860 by S.W. Clark as a clump of balloons, one per word, into a more linear architecture by Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg in 1877, then in 1950 took its modern form. Florey doesn't explain how diagramming came to be linked with Catholic schools. I have my ideas, though.

I don't claim that the nuns in my classrooms found theological or sexual significance in diagramming, but it was fun to torture language on Reed-Kellogg's rack. Diagramming may not have made me a better writer; I'm not sure the visual mode aids the construction of mental representations. As Florey describes, diagramming is useless. Numerous studies have shown that training in sentence diagramming has little to no effect on students' performance on grammar usage tests or writing evaluations. And it's not an accurate portrait of how the parts of sentences relate to each other, either. (Linguists' tree diagrams are far more elegant.)

But diagramming is kinky because it forces the structure of language to wear the clothes of images. A sentence diagram is less a map than a portrait, and in this vaudeville language is painted, corsetted and trussed.

(But you should also see how awesomely Michael Bierut at Design Observer makes the piece look by going here.)

Commemorating Gerald Ford, not with a Ford blooper, but one about him -- one that Kermit Schafer thought very highly of in Schafer's Blunderful World of Bloopers:

Tom Snyder, popular late night talk master on NBC-TV, tells of the classic blooper revolving around President Ford. The blooper is bound to get the notoriety of the All Time Great Blooper which centered around President Herbert Hoover, who was introduced as Hoobert Heever. The daughters of the American Revolution gave a dinner in honor of President Ford. The master of ceremonies of this highly conservative group in attendance introduced the president thus: "Ladies and gentleman...The president of the United States, Gerald Smith!" There was consternation in the audience when it was recalled that Gerald Smith was one of America's foremost Fascists.

Schafer's bloopers, usually laugh-out funnier, need no exposition, as this one does. (They're more like this reported quip from a disc jockey: "Check your local newspooper for movie listings." Or this one from a radio broadcaster: "I was almost late for the broadcast because I went to see my Uncle Jack off on the Queen Mary.") And he also includes very few about politicians: one from Adlai Stevenson, a couple mentioning Nixon and a few involving Henry Kissinger. The great bulk come from anonymous broadcasters, celebrity talkers (like Johnny Carson or Merv Griffin), live commercials, and media-innocents interviewed in game shows.

What does this mean? We don't need more proof of this, but I think it's a reminder of how distant the political world used to be from the entertainment world. Frank Rich's columns wouldn't have been comprehensible if the two were divided, but now people treat the political stage as exactly that: a stage, one among many others. Which is why Americans gave Clinton such high approval ratings even during the Lewinsky scandal, and why Bush's blundering was so fascinating.

Daniel Gross in Slate re-casts the trope of "jobs that Americans won't do" as "jobs that Americans won't do for those wages":

It's not so much that Americans aren't willing to pick fruit and become computer programmers. Rather, they aren't willing to do those jobs for the prevailing wages and benefits. The Army may need foreign nationals to help fill its ranks, but the private security firms that pay six-figure salaries to ex-military types for security work don't.

Same goes for translators, interpreters, and other language workers, Domna Stanton.

The failure here isn't in the work ethic of Americans. Rather, it lies with the CEOs, business owners, university and hospital administrators, and government officials—and ultimately, with all of us who benefit from cheap labor—to offer the wages and benefits necessary to attract sufficient numbers of legal workers. There's a reason they call the labor market a market.

Ask a journalist or editor why they clean up quotes, and they'll say it makes them unreadable. Plus (they'll add) it's not relevant -- it's the story.

Can anyone honestly say that this isn't the story?

No, I, I, I, I don't, that we didn't do a better job? Or they didn't do a better job? (smile) Not at all. I think, I think I'm proud of the efforts we did. Uh, we liberated that country from a tyrant. Uh, I think the Iraqi people owe the, the American people a huge debt of gratitude. That's the problem, here in America. They wonder whether or not there is a gratitude level that's significant enough in Iraq.

It's uh (sigh), you know I, uh (looking to sky), uh, it's hard to, uh, for the family members to recount, uh, or relive their love in front of the President (shrug). Yet, you know once we get beyond the initial (pause), kind of meeting, it's amazing how strong the folks are and umm, they want to just let 'em, let me know a lot of things. They want me to let me know what their son or husband was like.

(From excerpts of a verbatim transcript of President Bush's 60 Minutes interview, posted at Daily Kos the other day. For constrast, look at CBS's cleaned up transcript. )

The Kos comment thread then runs its tick-tock course through the usual linguistic critiques, which I'll analyze in another post.

Hey, look, fast information is bad for your eyes, your skin, and your teeth. Fast information: it's not organic, and it cuts out the small producer. That's why I promote slow information.

(Come on, how else can I explain why I'm building my archive page so slowly?)

Why are the stories I love doing the ones that get forgotten? This one about the Intel building in Austin came out two months after 9/11 and the same Thursday as a huge rainstorm in Austin. I still like the story, though.

Carol Azizian is an arts, entertainment, and features reporter for The Flint Journal, which published her story, "Language of the Future," in today's edition. She visits an Arabic class at the local community college, where students get to eat hummous and learn the Arabic word. All very fun, sweet, feature-y.

Toward the middle of the hummous-eating, Azizian writes:

But it's not the easiest language for Americans to learn.

OK, I don't know if this sentence, which is frankly stupid, belongs to Azizian or an editor. Why is it stupid? 1) "Americanness" doesn't make a language more or less difficult. Native English-speaking, however, is a factor. So is monolingualism. So is a person's age. But a person's nationality? Not relevant.

So let's rewrite her sentence:

But it's not the easiest language for native English-speaking adults to learn.

Better, but only a smidgen so. Even if this weren't a meaningless banality, it puts the burden of difficulty on the language, not on the monolingual adults, where it belongs. The sentence doesn't explain why the difficulty, whether you pin it on the language or the learner. And it doesn't explain how the instructor, or the students themselves, will attempt to circumvent those issues.

The bigger problem -- and here I fault her editor -- is that it's an underwritten sentence. It's the footprint on top of the heart of the story. Azizian should be sent back to the bench. She missed the guts of it. The drama. Yeah, there's drama in this stuff. How adults crash against something that's bigger than them. How they can't fake it. You can't bullshit grammar, ya know? Grammar, vocabulary, penmanship: so forgettable, so ignorable, so egg-headed. Here it creates real friction. Can you parse it? Can you remember it? Are you really that much of a moron? Maybe I wouldn't be such a moron in Spanish, says Joe Six-pack, but I'm a total idiot in Arabic, etc.

But let's pretend that maybe Azizian didn't write that sentence, that she wrote something like, "The adults, none of whom have studied a language other than English, grapple with the intricacies of making Arabic words bravely. They hate making mistakes. But they know they'll improve, slowly." Or something like that.

Even if she hadn't written that, she wrote this:

Ghattas, who is of Palestinian descent, said he's teaching the students how to read and write and speak simple conversation. The spoken language has many different dialects. For example, he said, people from Egypt speak in a different dialect than those from Tunisia.

Another missed opportunity. Between those two mundane facts -- a Palestinian teacher and multiple dialects -- is a whole world of politics, economics, and decisions. Someone who knew more about language would ask, what dialect are you teaching them? Why did you decide on that one? How do you justify teaching that dialect instead of this one? Maybe he won't teach them dialects, but instead teach them classical Arabic. Someone who knew about language would know that Mr. Ghattas' students would be hard pressed to direct a taxi or order food on the streets of, say, Cairo if they spoke the Arabic of the Koran.

The Flint Journal doesn't have the only editors and reporters in America who set the discourse about language in America back with stories like these -- and don't realize what they're doing.

Here's something interesting from Terranova, the main academic blog for discussion of virtual worlds: why some gamers are reluctant to add their voices to their gameplay.

Complain as you wish about corporate jargon: when my wife (who works in a corporate setting) brings home juicy phrases, I find them entertaining. Also kind of sad, but not for the reasons you’d expect. I’ll mention two. The one she’s used in actual conversations with me is “to be the long pole in the tent,” which refers to the person or organization that plays a key role in a project. (Note, she’s never used it to refer to me.)

The other one, which I heard for the first time this weekend at the company party, is “to wear the big hat,” which I guess refers to a person who takes responsibility, looks out for other people, and directs them, but isn’t necessarily a formal leader. (In a more horizontal organization, the person who wears the big hat is the visible one?)

What’s sad about these corporate idioms is the nostalgia for a lost world of work they evoke. Not only is it a manly world, it’s a world before information economies, a place where people used tents, poles, hats, and other apparatus of industry and agriculture. There’s no going back – and the fact of the matter is, most of us wouldn’t want to work where our great grandfathers and grandmothers did. (Spend time in Mexico, however, and you'll see that world of hard physical work so present it seems nearly absurd. Most of us wouldn't want to work there, either.)

That doesn’t mean we can’t jack around with idioms that harken to that age, though. I think my wife should introduce idioms that play on the work nostalgia but are, actually, meaningless. For example, admiring someone as “the widest pulley in the rigging.” Or criticizing someone for “sucking the hemp out of the rope.”

The popular belief is that protests arise when large numbers of individuals are fed up with the injustices of their lives. Actually, that rarely occurs. Rather, people rise up when they sense a whiff of hope.

Killer quote from here.

What's weird about this stage of publishing a book is how bits and pieces of it surface on the web: a thumbnail description at Amazon, another thumbnail on the Random House site, and now this, the table of contents at the Library of Congress.

Yeah, me too. Weird.

Edward Wasserman, a journalism professor, wrote a column for the Miami Herald in which he called for the end of beat reporting, because the beat structure asks reporters to make compromises to avoid conflicts with the sources they groom. In this On The Media interview, he says

I think that reporters should be asked routinely, what is the best story you know about that you can't write, and tell me why you're not writing it.

The two best things I can't write about:

1. Last April, there was an accident in a UT-Austin lab involving an influenza virus, which UT has been covering up, according to the Sunshine Project.

2. In the 1980s or 90s, a biography of Harry Ransom was commissioned by the UT Regents but found unacceptable for publication. The manuscript left with the author, a former English professor, for a job in another Southern state.

Everette Jordan, the head of the National Virtual Translation Center, testified before a Senate subcommittee on homeland security on Thursday. His testimony is here. The NVTC was created by the Patriot Act to provide translation resources to federal agencies at at a time when the need to build more foreign language expertise in the U.S. grew political legs. The shortage had existed for a long time, but not until 9/11 did the costs of the shortage become clear.

The NVTC was also an innovation. Though it's a joint FBI/CIA project, NVTC translators can be engaged by any federal agency. It's like a federal contractor inside the government. Agencies otherwise balk at sharing resources. The NVTC also recruited gay linguists fired by the military and found ways to keep retired experts, who take years to train, in the workforce. It also served as a magnet for technological innovation. Other agencies are bound by (among other things) legacy computer systems; the NVTC, an entirely new shop, had no such constraints. Jordan described some of the developments:

Major projects have included the Language and Technology Resource Nexus, which is a software system to facilitate secure information sharing among language professionals, and the IC Parallel Corpora Database, a joint project with the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, which will enable government agencies to store and retrieve matched sets of documents in the original language with their translations. This database will be invaluable in supporting advances in machine translation as well as providing training material for students of foreign languages.

His rest of his testimony was bland and guarded. I bet he saved the details for a closed-door session. I bet that the subcommitee also heard classified testimony from Jordan about how much work they've done and specific instances where NVTC work has cracked a case. In 2003, Jordan became the head of the NVTC, which I wrote about for Technology Review in 2004. He's a former NSA linguist who became the visible face for NSA work after 9/11, though this CNN interview was broadcast in 2005, just after the NYT broke the domestic surveillance story:

ENSOR: Have you ever found yourself listening to an American, a U.S. person, on a tape?

JORDAN: No.

ENSOR: And what do you do -- what are the instruction -- no, you never have?

JORDAN: No, I haven't.

ENSOR: What are your instructions in the event you should find yourself listening to an American, a U.S. person on a tape?

JORDAN: We have very strict protocols towards handling that -- those sorts of situations. And really, we erase the thing, but we also report that thus and such has happened.

One commenter on my Design Observer piece about sentence diagramming was a young Boston artist, Kelly Sherman, some of whose art utilizes sentence diagrams. She doesn't torture the sentences as much as tickle the poetry out of them:

In her comment she wrote:

I'm shocked—and thrilled—to see so many people with something to say about sentence diagrams. I have been using the form in my artwork for a few years now and have come to learn that people either adore sentence diagrams or despise them. I think the many posts make that quite clear. Needless to say I loved them! Now I especially like using the diagram form to reiterate or, better yet, subvert the meaning of the sentence being diagrammed. If you're interested: www.kellysherman.net/sentencediagrams

Her diagrams are beautiful -- the one I've posted here (with her permission) doesn't render very well, so I'd encourage you to look at them on her site.

Boil the ocean

Open the kimono (but don't show the tag)

More?

(Thanks to Jill & Steph for the content.)