Since I'm not doing much besides finishing a piece for Science, an op-ed for the New York Times, and embarking on a piece of political reporting for the Texas Observer, let me link to my other blog, which is an experiment in hyper-local journalism:

Rumors of Grounds

Backstory: my neighborhood lacks a coffee shop, though rumors about when one might finally appear circulated. I decided to track the rumors via a blog, which became a small gathering place. I've also met a lot of great people: entrepreneurs, activists, and ordinary neighborhood folks.

Friend J sent this story from LifeHacker about corporate idioms, including:

--take this offline
--touch base
--open the kimono

Some didn't count as idioms, to my eye, because they don't employ any metaphors, though they comprise another interesting category of bureaucracyspeak: the euphemism. As in:

going forward..." as meaning: "I'm not going to tell you that you just did this wrong, but never do it that way again."

All in all, an interesting discussion. However, I'm glad to report that hat they accepted my comment about our pretend corporate idiom, "suck the hemp out of the rope":

Around here people say "suck the hemp out of the rope," which means the effort has been ruined, often at great effort.

It's out there. Now we wait to see how it spreads.

I don't know anything about ending a TV series, actually, but I like what I see. The way "The Sopranos" ended last night seemed perfect, both from a writer's perspective and as a member of the audience.

One way that good literature works is by serving as a platform for further discussion and social interaction. It does this by being enthymematic, as I've discussed before here. The basics of the dynamic are this:

In a similar way, narratives operate by a series of structured incompletions. (The enthymeme is the most basic form of this structured incompletion.) One set of incompletions are necessary for plot. Another set is necessary for any linear arrangement of language. In these, the completion is postponed and often made available by the text or narrative. There's also the completion that's offered by the audience, which (if you could get inside their heads) is the thing that makes the narrative complete and meaningful.

So what is a writer trying to do when they draw attention to the basic engine of the narrative itself by ending with a structured incompletion, as "The Sopranos" did last night? (They didn't even let the Journey refrain finish.) In other narratives, this has been used to sharpen and focus the audience's desire for completion, then force the audience to question that desire. I'm thinking here of "Limbo," but also "Lost in Translation," which are two great examples of artful endings via structured incompletion.

However, in "The Sopranos," I think it's a basic act of care for the audience. It says, I know you've been talking about how all this is going to end, so keep talking. That community you built, those conversations you had: keep having them. I know, because we were doing it: over at S and J's house with M and K, eating Italian cold cut sandwiches, drinking wine, and going around the table saying what we thought would happen and what would disappoint us.

I also can't help but see this ending as protective. It was almost as if David Chase was saying, narrative closure is a part of your world, not of this imaginary world. It's the way the audience's world works, but not the Soprano world. And what has been so fascinating about the show (and as many commentators have said) is how it provoked, and questioned, and undermined, the audience's fascinated voyeurism. We needed to peer into this world in order to be able to see our own more clearly. So ending the show this way keeps the line between the two worlds drawn tight. Inviolate. It preserves the fiction-ness of the fictional universe. And while it may not be what we wanted, it's what we needed.

Straight from the Southern Baptist Convention: President Frank Page, describing how his daughter has just finished a "baster -- uh, a master's degree..."

No disrespect meant to Page, but it's funny that an anticipation of a single bilabial (he went on to describe her bachelor's degree) meant that most of the word "bastard" was just spoken on the platform at the SBC.

No, it's not an exotic disease, but it is the "hot flush of Chinese in the globe," and it does come from China.

From the lynabc.com website, an interactive platform for helping people learn Chinese:

Recent years, China is becoming stronger and stronger in politics and economy. And now China attracts more attention of other countries,so learning Chinese becomes a trend.Chinese government catches this hot flush to popularize Chinese for enhancing its international influence.

I'll be spending some time here in the next few days to see what's hot.

Wow, check this out: the list of other writers at the Texas Book Festival: Jeffrey Toobin. Robert Draper. Karen Olsson. Dagoberto Gilb.

Had a good time talking to writer Jonathan L'Ecuyer, who put together a good piece about me for this week's Haverhill Gazette:

While growing up in Greater Haverhill and attending Central Catholic High School, Michael Erard spent much of his time hanging out with friends and going out with girlfriends in Haverhill; he made a living flipping burgers at the Route 125 McDonald’s. However, it was Erard’s first job in the Haverhill area that would have an impact on his life forever.

The 39 year-old resident of Austin, Texas left the Haverhill area to attend college. After earning a doctorate from the University of Texas, Erard quickly went on to launch an accomplished journalism career as a regular contributor to publications such as the New York Times, The New Republic and Rolling Stone magazine, to name a few. In August, Pantheon, a division of Random House, will publish Erard’s first book: “Um ... Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean.”

The book is just the latest accomplishment for Erard and currently the exclamation point on a career that started at The Haverhill Gazette when the trained linguist was just 14 years old. Over 25 years later, Erard remembers walking into the Gazette’s West Lowell Avenue building for the first time:

The rest (including a Q&A) is here.

For what it's worth, I never claim to be a "regular contributor" to anybody. But I'll use the old freelancer's rule that if you do one thing for them, you get to attach their name to yours.

The last place on earth where you can still hear the strangest languages ever spoken

THE death of any language is a tragedy, but some are a more distressing loss than others. A handful of endangered languages are the last refuges of odd linguistic features that, once their host language disappears, will be gone forever.

One is Tofa, spoken by a handful of nomads in the Eastern Sayan mountains of southern Siberia. Starting in the 1950s, the Soviet government forced the Tofa people to learn Russian and abandon their traditional ways of life. Now, there are only 25 Tofa speakers left, all elderly. When they die, one utterly unique feature of Tofa will disappear: a suffix, -sig, that means "to smell like." In Tofa you can add -sig to the word ivi-, (reindeer) to describe someone who smells like a reindeer. No other language in the world is known to have this kind of suffix.

Linguist K. David Harrison of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania has documented similar examples of endangered "information packaging" systems in his book When Languages Die. One of these is the body counting system used in an estimated 40 languages in Papua New Guinea. In languages like Kaluli and Kobon, the words for numbers are the names of body parts. So 1 to 10 in Kobon are "little finger, ring finger, middle finger, forefinger, thumb, wrist, forearm, inside elbow, bicep, shoulder." To count higher, you count the collarbone and the hollow at the base of the throat - and then right down the other side, all the way to 23. You can count to 46 by counting back the other way and even higher by starting over and doing it all again. So 61 in Kobon is "hand turn around second time go back biceps other side"....

Google ads match searches for my book with ads for women's intimates...

An editorial assistant at Allure, putting together a piece about the book, asked me what verbal blunders tell about us. I wrote:

Yesterday I couldn't leave the gym because it was pouring down rain and I didn't have an umbrella, so I sat and waited for a while and watched little kids coming in for soccer camp, which had been moved inside. I don't have kids of my own, don't have a lot of access to them. But I really liked watching them trickle in, some with parents, some alone, some get spooked by the large new space, others handle climbing the stairs with a selfless aplomb.

I think verbal blunders say something about us the way that children say something about us. They provide a glimpse of who we are as creatures, as biological organisms with these really amazing brains, before (and in spite of how) society tries to contain and discipline us. Verbal blunders are small moments, fleeting and often microscopic, of the wildness that's a part of all of us. Maybe encounters with that aren't for everyone's taste. But I find them totally fascinating.

Next time someone asks me about how some aspect of American language has changed, I'm going to send them here: a 100 million word corpus, taken from Time Magazine from 1923 to 2007.

Of course I search "uh" (no hits) and "um," where I discovered this from a review of Britania Waives the Rules, from 1935:

In their paragraph on the speech of England's Best People. Authors Douglas & LeCocq disclose some of the secrets of its complex simplicity, consisting of " 'um's, 'aw's, and 'er's, the meanings of which vary according to the context. 'Um' may mean 'These are good tripe and onions.' 'You smell like a rose,' or 'Waiter, another whisky and soda.' This sort of thing makes it difficult for the foreigner, but the English themselves can tell instantly what is meant by the lack of inflection in the voice and the complete absence of expression on the face.

The corpus calculates frequencies by decade, which confirms the notion that the rhetoric of the verbatim has become more available: "um" appears 6 times in the 1920s (and all of these are faux Indian English) and remains under 18 times per decade until the 1990s, when they are used 32 times (mainly to represent speaking) and 35 times in the 2000s (and we're barely 3/4 of the way through the decade).

The Washington Post's Linton Weeks takes a stab at understanding "so" and came to the source of all things expert on two-letter words:

Or maybe it's more popular because we need more flexibility in the contemporary world. Michael Erard, author of "Um . . . Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean," says that one thing that makes 'so' so useful is that "it ends with a vowel, which can be shortened or lengthened to fit all manner of emotional tones, settings and situations."

He says, "You can be more expressive and also think of what to say next simply by lengthening the vowel."

Weeks wrote a good piece; check it out. As for me, I hope to make it to three-letter words by 2009, right after my exegesis of "of" and "is."

Steve Kellman, who reviews books for the Texas Observer, does Um... here in "Applied Blunderology." He likes it!...this was a good line, too: "While Erard’s name suggests he was born to write about errata, his Ph.D. in linguistics from UT-Austin certifies he was trained for it." Kellman also appropriately notes that I am "more Meringerian than Freudian" -- you only get that if you've actually read the book.

But on this -- "a connoisseur of fumbles, Erard has a professional incentive to encourage their occurrence" -- I do have something to say. (Not having learned any such lesson as I suggest in the title of this post.) Verbal blunders will occur regardless of my encouragement, and regardless of anyone's attempts to quell them. So I have an incentive to encourage the wild, and discourage most attempts to civilize it. I'd like the book to be read as trying to discourage the fencing in of errors as "Freudian," or as "Spoonerisms," or as the unique characteristic of a president. Or, at least, for people to realize that when they're shown Freudian slips or Bushisms, they're looking at critters in a zoo, not how they actually appear.

All this is notes for a second edition, I guess...

Dear Sir or Madam,
I would like to submit this haiku to your Haiku Contest, because I think it captures the essence of all the haikus that you are likely to receive, comments on the plasticity of this venerable form, and, in so doing, defends the form itself against formula and sentimentality. Oh, did I really say that? Sorry. Anyway, my haiku is as follows:

i touchy feely
something something something some
nonprofit name here

Sincerely,
Michael Erard

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns -- when the article or book appears -- his hard lesson.

From Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer