Wednesday, November 07, 2007

There

I'm going to make it there. I'm going to make it there. I'm going to make it there.

Faltering and stumbling along the way.

But the directional sign points there.

So, I'm going there.

Posted by jieyi at 8:56 PM

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Saturday, November 03, 2007

Linguistics

Grabbed this off a book review that my Philosophy professor wanted us to comment about.

It's real funny stuff for those who've wondered quite a bit about the linguistics behind how we use certain words in real life.

The Stuff of Thought, by Steve Pinker, review by Colin McGinn.

1. In the early part of the twentieth century the following names were reserved primarily for men: Beverly, Dana, Evelyn, Gail, Leslie, Meredith, Robin, and Shirley. But not much emerges about why names change as they do, besides some platitudes about the need for elites to stand out by adopting fashions different from the common herd.

2. I very much enjoyed the chapter on obscenity, which asks the difficult question of how words deemed taboo differ from their inoffensive syn-onyms (e.g., shit and feces). It can't obviously be the referent of the term, since that is the same, and it isn't merely that the taboo words are more accurately descriptive (excre-ment is equally accurate, but it isn't taboo). Pinker reports, no doubt correctly, that swearing forces the hearer to entertain thoughts he'd rather not, but that too fails to distinguish taboo words from their nontaboo synonyms. The phenomenon is especially puzzling when we note that words can vary over time in their taboo value: damn used to be unutterable in polite society, while cunt was once quite inoffensive (Pinker reports a fifteenth-century medical textbook that reads "in women the neck of the bladder is short, and is made fast to the cunt").

3. Of particular interest to the grammarian is the fact that in English all the impolite words for the sexual act are transitive verbs, while all the polite forms involve intransitive verbs: fuck, screw, hump, shag, bang versus have sex, make love, sleep together, go to bed, copulate. As Pinker astutely observes, the transitive sexual verbs, like other verbs in English, bluntly connote the nature of the motion involved in the reported action with an agent and a receiver of that motion, whereas the intransitive forms are discreetly silent about exactly how the engaged objects move in space. The physical forcefulness of the act is thus underlined in the transitive forms but not in the intransitive ones. None of this explains why some verbs for intercourse are offensive while others are not, but it's surely significant that different physical images are conjured up by the different sexual locutions—with fuck semantically and syntactically like stab and have sex like have lunch.

Posted by jieyi at 3:44 PM

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