...and where "dead wood" comes from.

("Dead wood" refers to tenured academics who don't publish or research or do much of anything, who might be pruned to let the intellectual life of a department of school flourish if only one had shears sharp enough.)

Axelrod says he loves man-on-the-street interviews, and while digging through the tape the week before, he found one he did with a young Hispanic guy. “He gives you a — a sense of hope,” the young man says, squinting past the camera, swaying slightly. “Uh, at a time when, you know, things in this country are not going so well.” It’s a good message for Obama, and a good messenger, but what Axelrod likes are the stutters, the verbal hiccups: “That kind of authenticity is how you cut through.”

From the NYT Magazine's profile of David Axelrod, Barack Obama's political consultant.

I'm telling you, the days of glib fluency as political and social capital are over. Bush proved it. Ira Glass proved it. We prefer in speakers what we prefer in individual selves, and what people are hungry for now is connection to authenticity, spontaneity, and presence.

Prediction: my teen daughter digs out my typewriters, Daddy why don't you use these?, thinks her retro technology is cool -- except that we've already been nostalgic for the typewriter. Or at least the writers among us, for whom the noisy clank equaled work, its silence death.

The house will explode with the sounds of TYPING!

Hormonal furies.

Me: smiling.

From an interview with Robert Birnbaum about The Cold Six Thousand:

It is written in a direct sentence, declarative sentence style. It is full of the American idiom, racist invective. Yiddish. Elements of French and Spanish. Good plain hard old American slang. It is a deliberately proffered vulgarization and coarsening of the American idiom. The style, which is very easy to read, runs to shorter rather than longer sentences. No compound sentences. Only direct sentences and there is a design behind this. This book is a linguistic rendition of the violence of the text. It is a melding of form versus content. It is a representation of the violence of the events themselves and of the inner and outer lives of the three main characters, bad white men, doing bad things in the name of authority. These bear full brunt of both my empathy and my moral judgment. That said, it is a propulsive read. And it is a book that reads like nothing else. To compare this to Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake may be at first complimentary but those are deliberately obscure exercises in language, and this is a very blunt, forceful and easy rendering of the American language. Also, you get to this point very quickly.

Viva la cavale!

When it comes to language and politics, there are four major stories in the American context:

1) language diversity in the US vs. English-only nativism
2) the rhetoric and the reality surrounding foreign language expertise in the federal government
3) the evolution of linguistic style, including error, in public life; and
4) language work & workers in the war on terror & Iraq.

In the March 26 New Yorker, George Packer has a good story on Iraqi interpreters in Iraq and how surprisingly ill-treated or ignored they’ve been. Packer raises the question: have we prepared to take the people who have helped us in Iraq, when and if we leave? The answer is, of course, no.

Iraqi interpreters are the most contemporary manifestation of a long line of translators and cultural mediators who have done the work of the expanding West whenever it contacts non-European cultures and languages. This lineage of language work begins with Doña Malinche, extends through the frontier expansion of the American West (think not only Squanto and Sacagawea but numerous scouts and soldiers recruited, bribed or captured from Indian tribes), and is now bureaucratized and technologized to support our unpredictable geopolitical commitments and needs to surveil a world of telecommunications.

As I was working on this blog post, wondering how I was going to find out the history of translation and translators on the American frontier, I saw an article on Alternet by Jeff Stein, the National Security editor of Congressional Quarterly about just how poorly underskilled military linguists – even those “certified” in Arabic – are. He interviews a former contract linguist, Dustin Langan, who tells a horrific story about how language work is really treated:

If you look at some of these companies, I think they were originally communications companies, and they said to themselves, We'll do linguistics too. They kind of treated like it was a technology they could buy and send over there.

Marc Herman also did a cool interview with Langan in Radar.

Stein's piece ends with something that's been noted a lot before, but seeing the figures sort of brings it home:

According to a Feb. 2005 report from the Government Accountability Office, the Department of Defense has "separated several hundred members with training in important foreign languages. During fiscal years 1994 through 2003, DOD separated 322 service members for homosexual conduct who had some skills in a foreign language that DOD had considered to be especially important."

Among them were 55 soldiers considered "proficient" in Arabic, the GAO said. But as disturbing as a lot of people found that report, the fine print should have -- but didn't -- rile people who are in charge of this war.

Here it is: Of the banished homosexuals, 209 had attended DLI "for training in one of these important languages,' the GAO said.

Lest you think there's some gay connection to language aptitude, Stein's last fact should disabuse you: only 98 of the 209 had received a proficiency rating; of these, 62 scored at or below the midpoint of the Department of Defense's scale. That is, only one-third of the people who could speak a foreign language were any good, and they were less than one-fifth of the total who attended DLI. The confounds are many, though. The count spans 9 years, for one thing. And I don't know the proficiency rate for DLI grads as a whole. If you're part of an aggrieved group in a culture like the military's, does that affect test performance? What's the attitude towards gays at DLI specifically? And would you test lower if you knew you were getting kicked out?

Something going on here worth checking out.

My piece posted Tuesday on Technology Review's website:

Immersive language learning in a realistic environment with native-speaking teachers will soon be available online, in the popular virtual world Second Life. Starting in September, a language school called Languagelab.com will offer English and Spanish classes. The cost of the classes will be comparable to those in the real world, which can cost several hundred U.S. dollars for a semester-long course. "You won't be taking classes in LanguageLab because it's a lot cheaper," says LanguageLab founder David Kaskel, an entrepreneur and PhD candidate at the Center for Computing in the Humanities at King's College, London. "We think it's a lot better than in a physical space because there's more you can offer than in a classroom."

To read the rest of the piece, go here.

I wanted to go into games and microworlds for language learning in more depth. One big issue: Do these help students learn faster and better? I haven't seen any outcome studies. But if structured immersion in the physical world works, then interactions in digital environments should work too. Another big issue: How long does the gee-whiz effect take to wear off? I presume that homework in Second Life is just as odious...

Bound galleys came the other day...wow, it's quite a feeling.

My story about LibriVox in the May 2007 Reason magazine contains an unintentional error introduced in the editing process:

Of all the books published in the last 84 years, only those published in 1923 have entered the public domain...

This is incorrect. Books published before 1923 are free and clear in the public domain, though Mark Owings, a Reason reader, pointed out in an email to me many of the finer points to US copyright law:

You say “Of all the books published in the last 84 years, only those published in 1923 have entered the public domain…” Five points, some minor.

Firstly, that applies to the US, since copyright in other countries is more complicated, and things in the public domain here might not be salable or distributable elsewhere.

Secondly, some things that one might expect to be copyrighted were never actually sent in for copyright, since everything is assumed to be copyrighted! A lot of television episodes, since the studio did not think it was worth spending the fees and sending a copy of the script, and at least the first year of the magazine WEIRD TALES, I know. And of course the whole business with the revisions to The Lord of the Rings was because Houghton Mifflin did not bother with the forms and fee.

Thirdly, as I understand it, items +before+ 1923 are automatically in the public domain; those from 1923 may still be covered.

Fourthly, the renewal period for items after a certain point (I think in the 1970s) was 50 years after the death of the author, later life plus 75., so the death-date of the author may be a factor.

Fifthly, maybe most importantly, many items were never renewed, and therefore became public domain after 28 years. One can download from Gutenberg a list of items renewed from 1950 to 1977, covering original publication dates of 1923 to 1950. A lot of authors, or their agents or estates, are sloppy about that.

The US copyright law is actually something of a patchwork quilt, with little gaps from the three times it has been revised since 1968 (and in some ways it was stranger before about 1900).

For a handy-dandy flowchart for determining when copyright on works expires, go here.

I regret the error, and we will slap the editorial gremlins accordingly.

No disrespect meant here, but I've been talking to Southern Baptists and noticed they pronounce it "Babdist." Some people write this as "Babtist" but that's I hear it with the voicing of /b/ assimilated to the /t/. In any case, the /bt/ combo in the middle of words doesn't get used much in English, and /bd/ is even rarer. Bravo, Babdists.

For a brief linguistic discussion, go here.

New York Mag notes how some NYC pol has improved her public speaking:

No ums. No uh-uhs. Direct eye contact.

Note: the emphasis on delivery, on "slick" = improvement. Note: none of the old school Greeks or Romans noted pause fillers or their absence.

Want to know where this aesthetic of umlessness comes from? Read Chapter Five of Um...

Observations. No claims or conclusions. But language and literacy stumbles through the VA Tech story. Cho attacked French and German language classes. He wrote plays and poetry; a poetry teacher kicked him out of her class. In high school, Cho was mocked for his English, his voice. From an AP report:

As part of an exam in Spanish class, students had to answer questions in Spanish on tape, and other students were so curious to know what Cho sounded like that they waited eagerly for the teacher to play his recording, she said. She said that on the tape, he did not speak confidently but did seem to know Spanish.

And this:

Once, in English class, the teacher had the students read aloud, and when it was Cho's turn, he just looked down in silence, Davids recalled. Finally, after the teacher threatened him with an F for participation, Cho started to read in a strange, deep voice that sounded "like he had something in his mouth," Davids said.

"As soon as he started reading, the whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, `Go back to China,'" Davids said.

Adolescents teasing someone because he talks different isn't surprising. That there are foreign language classes in an engineering building--it's a university, everyone teaches all over. (I used to teach freshman comp in the ROTC building.) Cho was an English major, so creative writing and poetry may have been required. All this miscellany. None of it surprising. But so much of it. Like I said, I have no conclusions or claims.

Steph reports, "Don't put a dead cat on the table," which apparently means something like, "Don't present something that doesn't work as if it did." At first glance, this goes against my hypothesis -- that corporate idioms recall a longlost world of work, often masculine work -- but I think we talked ourselves to the point last night that the idiom fits well into farm life. So, hypothesis preserved.

OK, so we've all heard of (and maybe seen) tattoos in other languages that make no sense or are offensive. What you might not have heard of are websites devoted to "tattoo translations," or places to get one-off translations of names or other phrases. Here's one that does free translations into Devanagari, Sanskrit, Hindi, & Marathi (though it's not really clear to me what they do, since the site says "Devanagari Translation To Sanskrit, Hindi & Marathi").

Anyway, the site lists what people asked to be translated: Lotus, Indra; Jodi; Svamarga, own path; bajrang bali; Gaia Linda my light, my life; Essence of Life; Courage; Seek the Truth; Nida, Zaki, Andy. That was just for today.

A little cruise around the Web shows other tattoo translations into Hebrew, Gaelic, Farsi, Hawaiian, Japanese, and Chinese (the last two are kanji, basically). Sounds like a lot of the botched translations came from the power of the internets, too, where people got punked with translations they thought were real. This rant from a tattoo artist was interesting:

I hate the requests. Hell, if it's got meaning to you, go for it. But I do NOT understand the concept of getting a symbol permanently placed on your body if you can't 1. Read it, 2. Pronounce it, 3. Recognize it if it wasn't on your body.

I venture to guess a couple of things: That the wearers are more into different scripts than different languages, if they're not native or frequent users of those scripts/languages (ie., you'd find more English-speaking Brits with tattoos in Chinese than ones in French); that there's a greater proportion of exotic script tattoos now than in the past; and that tattoos in foreign languages, whether the translations are correct or not, are a condition of globalization.

Those lists of bad English hotel signs or t-shirts from abroad were always funny, but come on, they're easy targets. So I was glad to see the word spread about bad Chinese/kanji tattoos--it showed how much we're all goofing it up, making it up as we go, from a simple tattoo all the way up to foreign policy.

OK, "style wars" is dramatic. But I want to make some comments about two dominant styles of media speech, which I’ll call the raw and the cooked. The raw = disfluent; unmonitored, unscripted, unedited, underedited, and perhaps unrehearsed. The cooked = fluent, ideally uninterrupted, usually because it’s scripted; faster (more words per minute & less pausing); edited. “This American Life” has always been an island of raw in a sea of cooked, though to be honest, it’s a deliberate rawness. It’s High Raw.

Nancy Franklin, in a New Yorker review of This American Life's tv version, is a fan of the cooked, and she thinks the cult of the raw is too popular. She criticizes TAL host Ira Glass for avoiding, and dismissing, "the familiar orotundity that we all think of as the proper way to address an audience,” then goes on to say:

This business of keepin’ it real—it can be carried too far, and it can come across as arrogant. Real is earned: Garrison Keillor’s “Prairie Home Companion” sets up a fictional world that is so fully imagined that it seems as real as the one we actually inhabit—precisely because he’s performing, and not just “being himself.”

Admittedly, drawing the line between the raw and the cooked isn't easy sometimes. But “arrogant”? I don’t see that as the reigning impact of the purveying of rawness. Let’s put aside the obvious fact that Franklin isn’t part of TAL’s audience. The raw has become associated with specific aesthetic values, such as spontaneity and authenticity, and economic values, such as the small-scale, independent, and open source. (Not to be forgotten, the cooked is associated with aesthetic and economic values of its own, many of which don’t become clear until the raw emerges.) If you’re not part of the intended audience, you won’t key into those values.

Let’s also put aside Franklin’s obvious elitism about who will determine who has earned what and how far is “too far.” That’s her role as a critic speaking. That she chooses Garrison Keillor as her champion – Keillor, the poster boy of the empty nest set – is the second indicator there’s a generational thing going on. I don’t actually know how old Franklin is, but I bet she’s a baby boomer. “Keepin’ it real” also sounds like a catchphrase from another era.

And that brings me to the doorstep of ethos and style. Ethos, a term from classical rhetoric, refers to the character and credibility of the author/speaker, and it can be real or constructed. It’s both what allows one to “get away” with a certain style, as it is constructed and signaled through the use of a style. Style is reflective of and constitutive of ethos. As Franklin notes, ethos can be earned from an audience. But – and this is a point I hope she gets around to making at some point – it can also be bought, stolen, and gifted. It can be manufactured. And imposed. The raw emerges, as a style, and as a very powerful style, at the place where the ethos of the cooked starts to crack, where the automatic benefits of the cooked stop accruing. Whatever the cooked confers should be earned. But it often seems earned only because it has marked out, pushed out, rubbed out the raw.

High Cooked. High Raw. Low Cooked. Low Raw. Now I’ve gone and done it – made a matrix out of things.

Language Hat on bloopers:

...published bloopers are as reliably authentic as the letters columns in porn magazines.

My story on LibriVox in Reason is online:

In the dim, humid basement of his Maryland home, Michael Scherer, a tall 38-year-old with the long, square beard of a mandolin player or a monk, leans toward a rebuilt Russian tube microphone, desperate for silence so he can begin recording a 200-year-old essay by an American founding father. Even in the makeshift studio he has constructed, with thick blankets hanging from nails in the joists and the basement windows plugged with fiberglass, the sounds of lawnmowers, car alarms, birds, air conditioners, and children kicking balls in the street still intrude. “I have to hold on a minute here—there’s a, there’s a truck,” he says. A few seconds later, the truck passes, and he reads in his deep, resonant voice, “The Federalist.” He stops, clears his throat, and begins again. “The Federalist, No. 19.”

Read the rest here. And please note this correction.

This was a frustrating story to do, simply because the magazine that first assigned it bobbled it hopelessly. But looking back, I'm glad I did it. Hugh is a great guy, and so are the other LibriVoxers I talked to or met. We listened to a couple audiobooks on our road trip in December. More importantly, it forced me to rethink what I do as a writer and what the future of my current intellectual property model is. I haven't fully realized all the implications here, but I'm getting to implement some things in marketing Um...

I also became more interested in rights management for culture producers -- and consumers, too, for that matter. Every dollar you spend on culture and information products is an intellectual property decision. That means that listening to LibriVox is akin to shopping at Whole Foods (or, even better, your local farmer's market) in that you've made a conscious decision that the origins of this particular commodity matter to you.

And really, all this is why I love this writing thing. To be in the world and be changed.

"That earring has a really torbid history."
"Did you really say, torbid?"
"Oh, I guess I did."
"The word is turbid --"
"--but I also meant torrid."
"So that's perfect then. Torbid."
"Yeah, torbid."

Thanks to the powers of Misty, my webwife, Umthebook.com is now live. This is the main site for the book. Right now there's not much there, but eventually it will hold news & reviews, a bibliography, endnotes, errata, and an ambitious interactive component.

If you'd like to see Pantheon's summer catalog (where Um... is listed, with a photo of me mere hours before getting married), go here.