Ray Brinzer

In need of a joke, I checked to see what special day it was, today. At this point, every day of the calendar is something-day; while only a few of these are national holidays, and some others Federal Observances, many others are recognized by a state or local government, or simply announced by some organization. Yesterday was Arbor Day in Nebraska, for instance; but one may also find various claims that it was National Jelly Bean Day, as decided by… well, people who sell jelly beans, one presumes. And tomorrow is National Hairball Awareness Day… but of course, you knew that.

Today, however was William Shakespeare’s (roughly) 445th birthday, as well as Talk Like Shakespeare Day, by no less an authority than that of the mayor of Chicago (PDF). The day has its own website, which is certainly the mark of a significant occasion.

Anyway the site lists some simple tips on how to speak like Shakespeare; and while you might quibble with a few of them, this one is simply bad:

Men are Sirrah, ladies are Mistress, and your friends are all called Cousin.

People often take “sirrah” as a quaint form of “sir”… but it isn’t quite. “Sirrah” is used to address one’s inferior, or to insult a man by suggesting that he’s beneath you. Going about calling men “sirrah” all day is rude, in sooth; in good sooth, very rude. This is a surprising misuse, as the site seems to be the work of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater.

The Saturday before last (that is, January 10th) it snowed heavily. We were staying at my mother’s house, and I naturally felt it my responsibility to make sure the walk, stairs, and driveway were clear and safe. So I sent Johannes out to shovel them.

We discovered that the snow came up easily and packed tightly into the shovel — perfect for snowballs and snowmen.

I decided to do a classic 3-ball snowman, for my son’s amusement. Read more »

It’s pretty well-known that, “the opposite of progress is congress.” But you don’t hear so often that “the opposite of the constitution is prostitution”, or that, “if you are not a contestant, you must be a protestant.”

Like most things in English, affixes are weird. By affix, I mean a prefix or a suffix; these sometimes come in predictable opposites, as with “prepaid” and “postpaid”. But while the prefix for “prefix” is “pre-”, the prefix for “suffix” isn’t “post-”… and the postmaster’s arch-enemy isn’t the premaster. Nor can you tell, just by looking at the form of a word, whether it has an affix (though older writers often made it easier by hyphenating prefixes; e.g. to-day and to-morrow).

Now, this leads us very naturally to a deep discussion of linguistics. If you’re qualified to lead such a discussion, great; I look forward to reading it in the comments. I know just enough to be certain that a non-inflected language isn’t outflected, that you don’t find diphthongs in the lingerie department, and that you don’t wear them over your agglutination.

Which, really, is all for the better. Why labor to understand something, when you can abuse it for cheap thrills? I wrote a quick script to find matches between pro- and con- words… and to find the non-matches. The non-matches, really, are more interesting… because while the opposite of procrastinating isn’t ‘concrastinating’, it should be. Given that this sort of thing makes the language more regular, we’d actually be protorting it, rather than contorting it, so we should see this as a conblem. In fact, it’s prosiderate to convide such words.

Anyway, though… below are three tables. The first is the list of words (from the Unix ‘cracklib’ file) where the same ending forms legitimate words with both pro- and con- at the beginning (though not necessarily as prefixes modifying a root). The second and third list nonsense words made from swapping the letters ‘con’ and ‘pro’ at the beginnings of real words. And then, just for completeness, the code I wrote to generate the lists.

If you find the tables interesting reading… well, congratulations. You’re a geek.
Read more »

Back home safely, and the “lesson” proceeds apace.

Of all the weird things about our educational system, here in the US, foreign language instruction may be the weirdest. It’s well-known that one of the most important things is to start kids off early; in fact, if you start them off early enough, they really don’t need a “teacher”. Just put them around someone who speaks the language, and they’ll pick it up. Of course, they have to be taught to read and write, and it’s possible to learn to comprehend a language without gaining the ability to speak it, so you have to make sure you require the child to talk. But the key thing is, the earlier the better.

So, what do we actually do? Most often public schools have foreign language instruction for grades 9-12. They load the classes (and spend the money) that way because universities want to see foreign language classes on students’ transcripts. Presumably they want to see classes on transcripts because actually requiring any proficiency in a foreign language for admission would dramatically reduce their pool of potential students.

All of which is to say, we put on a half-hearted show, and waste people’s time and money in the process. And in this case, it’s directly attributable to the indifference of parents. If people wanted the real thing, they’d have it.

I’m completely with Mark Twain on this sort of thing: “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” I certainly don’t intend to let it interfere with that of my children.