I sent the link of my Texas Observer piece about trying to learn Yucatec Maya to Gary Bevington, who wrote the book about learning Maya in the field that I found so helpful. (Read the piece, you'll understand.) Bevington is now retired and lives part of the year with his wife in a house near Cobá -- he was probably there at the same time we were.

Funnily enough, Punta Laguna was also the place where he learned Maya, which he detailed in an e-mail back to me:

At that time there were no (alterni-)tours, guides, buses, etc at [Punta Laguna], just a few very poor Maya families, one headed by a guy named Serapio Canul, who loved the monkeys and had a dream for a nature preserve....

I drove out to PL very early every morning from Cobá where I was staying at a small hotel called El Bocadito. Serapio and I sat on a rock beside the lake and he told me stories about PL and his life in Maya, which I recorded on a cassette recorder. Then I played them back, and I tried to write them down and Serapio gave me his own translation of what he had said. Then I went back to El Bocadito and got the young guys who were waiters in the restaurant to listen to the tape, repeat what they heard and give me their Spanish version. I also worked on phrases and expressions I got from them. After a while, the Cobaeños decided that I was a worthy project, and so began a language immersion routine in which they spoke to me only in Maya. If I didn't understand, tough shit. If I said something in Spanish (which I didn't speak very well at all), they would paraphrase it in Maya and then respond.

In my article I mentioned the use of Maya in museum signs. Well, Bevington told me what was up with that:

You probably noticed that there is otherwise little or no public display of the language. These signs are readable by 'real' Maya only in conjunction with the parallel text in Spanish, and even then only with great difficulty. The whole idea is from the period when INAH fell under the nefarious influence of the U.S. National Park Service and spawned a cottage industry in translating the elevated Spanish of historical-anthropological description into Maya. This was poorly accomplished by calques, archaisms, loose paraphrases and such.

Calling bullshit on things like this made his Maya book more readable and authoritative.

I love reading lists of languages. If you know how to do it, with a little background info, you can tell a lot about an organization. A couple of years ago, the FBI put out a list of languages it was looking for info about. All of them seemed reasonable enough, but they also wanted to know about Broome Pearl Lugging Pidgin, an English-Japanese-aboriginal language pidgin spoken by pearl divers on the west coast of Australia, sprang up in the early 20th century, but had no living speakers. I made some inquiries, but was never able to figure out what the FBI wanted with it. Maybe some FBI guy was about to retire and write a novel and needed info about the pidgin. (If you know, drop me a line.)

Well, the Arizona State University Critical Languages Institute is offering intensive language courses in Albanian (ok, makes sense), Armenian (ok), Bosnian (sure), Macedonian (ok, probably on the Pentagon's list), Polish (ok), Russian (ok), Tatar (ok), Uzbek (ok, on the Pentagon's list), and Navajo (huh?). Maybe it's because they have Navajo instructors and demand for the class...or maybe there really is a critical need for Navajo in Arizona.

Maybe you wanted "goal-oriented, "add value," "proactive," "high level," "drill down" and other corporate phrases in a handy comic strip. Or, then, maybe you didn't. Anyway, here's a comic strip called "The Adventures of ACTION ITEM!" It needs updating but still has a classic feel.

Thanks to Kirk, who wears the big hat.

Something else writers waiting for their galleys do: talk to truckers.

This week was my first improv class, which I'm taking in order to prepare myself for whatever the release of Um... throws at me. Yes, that's right, the man who grew up half Catholic and half military (so that when I sin I do it like clockwork and with my shoes shined), the man who is wound tighter than Captain Ahab's wife's pocketwatch, is learning how to loosen up. I'm actually a very funny person; it's just that it takes place early in the morning and lasts for about half an hour. The rest of the time I live behind a cursor that doesn't care how quickly it moves forward and doesn't notice when it moves backwards, and most of the time working on texts so self-serious that vinegar would seem like dessert.

We met in a studio over the State Theatre, 12 of us, 11 students and the instructor, Shana Merlin. Now, I'm a cranky student, and I can pick on teachers and teaching style, but Shana was pretty much perfect: on point with the framing, interactive, clear. She's done this before a lot but isn't phoning it in. For someone bringing lessons about how to be in the moment, she is.

I won't get into the existential implications of improv, except to make two observations: 1) many of the improv games we played were forms of language play, whether a word association game, the "one word at a time" game (where three or more people give answers to questions, each saying one word in sequence), or the screaming game (everyone stands in a circle, heads dropped, then you look up; if you catch someone's eyes, the two of you must scream). The pairing of words is hilarious, and the deformations of syntax are acute (the one word at a time game is actually a good illustration of how sentences aren't linear, because the direction of a sentence is often decided two or more moves back), but what makes the language play so striking for adults is that it makes you step outside the strictly communicative functions of language that adults adopt. The common grounding of communication itself becomes a plaything; either you invent new premises or you throw out the grounding altogether. Interactions aren't about communication, they're about availability and response. This is something that Lee Glickstein says when he talks about the drawbacks of the Toastmasters' model of presentation training, which presumes that the conditions of communication are present. Often, they aren't.

This leads to the second observation: adults eventually become fixed in how they perceive and deal with frames (in the Batesonian sense). You begin to take the frames of daily life as immutable, as givens, not negotiated or imposed. So improv gives you ways to see those frames as flexible...also to see how they can be hijacked and pirated.

I wonder if improv is the Toastmasters of the Gen X and Gen Y crowd...more on this as I learn more.

If you don't have a toddler babbling at you, the next best thing for the linguistically alert (the dog making extended woofling noises is interesting very briefly) is to have a spouse or partner who works in environments where they use "birddog" as a verb, as in, "I'll go birddog that," which means to go hunting or searching for, though of course it doesn't literally involve dogs, birds, or guns.

All of which supports my thesis that corporate idioms are bit of nostalgia for a world of manly work that no longer exists.

For Molly Ivins' Final Friday parties, she would encourage people to come with poetry, songs, stories, and interpretive dance -- of which there was only one example I remember seeing. But she would have liked this: 19 Bushisms set to dance by a German immigrant.

The performance projects these (and 15 others) onto a screen behind the dancer:

"I'm the master of low expectations."

"You teach a child to read and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test."

"I hope you leave here and walk out and say, 'What did he say?'"

"I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully."

According to the article, these are Bush's "malapropisms," but as a forthcoming book will inform the writer, only one, the first, is a malapropism. The rest are solecisms (and to call them anything else is itself an error. Oh, how they multiply.).

She may want a cell phone next, but for now a web page will have to do.

Four years ago yesterday, I boarded an Amtrak train in Sacramento, California that was eventually 26 hours late arriving in Eugene, Oregon, a trip that should have lasted only 12 hours. For most of that 36 hours, we were stuck in the mountains, usually pulled into a siding, without television, radio, Internet, or cell phones, so totally isolated from the world that even the train companies themselves often forgot about us or couldn't reach us at all. For all we knew, we were going to pull into a train station and find the earth scorched, like that Twilight Zone episode where the homely librarian stumbles out of the book vault to find the world blown to smithereens.

Often I tell this story as a Bad Trip, the war a mere subplot, like the weather. And it's true, trapped on this moving jail, we were wrapped in our own dramas. The lawyers threatening to sue Amtrak. The conductors unlocking the unused car in the back for the smokers. A free breakfast on the second morning, with mutiny so near. (What do you mean, the crew has timed out and we're waiting for another crew to drive 3 hours from Klamath Falls?!) The train stopped so passengers could walk around. The three people who got left behind when the train took off. One woman told the conductor she saw the men running alongside her window, trying to catch up to the train, but by then we were many miles away. But the men hitched rides and got back on the train 3 hours later in the first town, having found it faster to go by car. And no one talked about the war, except to say, We're at war, standing in line for emergency rations of dehydrated scrambled eggs. Even though the three guys got back on the train to cheers, our own local resurrection, this Bad Trip really had the war at its core, because once you got into that vacuum in the mountains, where you couldn't hear the incessant beating of the war drums day and night, where there was deafening silence and even a peaceful calm once you were out of range of the war mongering mushroom cloud wavers, the war didn't seem necessary, and it didn't take long in that bubble to ask yourself: what's this war for, anyway?

Today Howard Fineman predicted that at least one presidential debate would be held in Spanish -- that is, that it would appear on a Spanish language television station (or so it was blogged here.)

"Look for the Spanish-language television networks to sponsor debates -- in Spanish -- in this presidential election season. And the two people who benefit from that are Bill Richardson, who we were discussing, and Chris Dodd, who was a Peace Corps worker... Dodd, I'm told by Spanish speakers, speaks Spanish better than Richardson does."

Which will be interesting, since Richardson is staking his political ethos on his ethnicity. Will Hispanic voters let him get away with that if his Spanish isn't as good as the white guy's? Or do they espouse what this guy said in the comments of The Bloggingstocks.com:

2. I lived in extreme south Texas for 30 years,and although I love the Hispanic people, their language, and their culture, more than one national language divides a country. Furthermore, if they don't like the US as it is, they should go back to Mexico. Don't import your 3rd world way of thinking here. Come here and learn our culture and our language, or go back.

Absolutely no citizenship should be conferred upon any foreigner unless the person is fluent, very fluent in English. This country was not made great by the Spanish language, or the Spanish speaking people, or by the ways of any of the Spanish speaking countries. Most of us who were born and raised here strongly resent you thinking about changing this country to your standards. You didn't make this country what it is. Love it or leave it.

I strongly believe that it should be made illegal to print ballots or any other material in anything but English. Catering to the Spanish language simply makes it easier for them not to learn English.

The reason we have such a conflict now over the issue is that it was not met with strict discipline when the very first immigrants arrived from the south. They could get by with Spanish, so they did. Now they want everybody to learn Spanish, or at least to have everything printed and spoken in both languages. It is high time to put a stop to this nonsense. No way, Jose.

After a week with family that started with a sweet hospital visit, became a sad deathbed vigil, and was capped with a wake, a funeral Mass, and coldcuts and Irish whiskey at my uncle's house, I'm going to do a few posts about death & dying, I think. My parents told me a bit about what they want for a funeral. Whoever survives will keep the ashes of the other, then both sets of ashes will be combined and scattered -- avoiding public lands, where pay-to-scatter businesses have collided with public land management policy (and rightly so, I think). A precise location hasn't been decided yet, though I asked them to choose one place, not a dozen; I don't want to have to be retired to visit them. My mother asked me what I wanted; I said I had no idea, except that it will involve cremation. And, I added, just plunk the ashes somewhere.

Norma Erard was my only real grandmother, the one with a kitchen, a garden, and a back room with treasures kids didn't touch. She was a sweet lady, a traditional Catholic, and the mother of 8 who harbored them against my gruff grandfather's tyrannical storms. It was often her green thumb against his iron thumb. She had 6 years after he died to explore life on her own, and she used the time well. She believed in St. Anthony, guardian angels, and going to heaven; when Misty and I showed up at her bedside, she thought I was an angel, and that she had passed away and made it to heaven. On the religion front, she always gave me a hard time, wanting me to practice Catholicism ("hard time" meaning that she asked a few unusually pointed questions, and made it a point to tell me she was praying for me), but she was never begrudging. After all, she was willing to think I was an angel. But isn't that just like a grandmother?

It's not Sher or even Ross. It's Ken Vincent that is the real problem. That guy can't finish a sentence. "The time is...uh 9: uh.... 18 and the uh... weather conditions for uh....the Seattle area are... going to be...uh cloudy..."

Jeeezus.

From a Seattleist discussion about a departing public radio announcer. Out of 9 comments, one is positive; the rest are negative. Of those 8, 2 are on delivery, 3 are on content (the rest are indeterminate). But this more or less matches the finding by Nicholas Christenfeld (which is in the conclusion of Um...) that people, when left to their own devices, will attend to style or content in more or less equal amounts...and that they attend to style more frequently when the content doesn't captivate (or disgust) them. If the comedians in "The Aristocrats" screw up you don't notice it. Or, ordinary folks don't. (I did.)