Undistracted driving

A Brainwaves cartoon about distracted driving:

(Hat tip to Karen Davis.)

The effects of speech rate

Zippy experiences the effects of slow speech rate:

Lagers and loggers

Chris Waigl sends on the cartoon below, displayed in Silver Gulch (“America’s northernmost brewery”) in Fox, Alaska:

For Chris, lager and logger are a minimal pair (with an unrounded vowel in the first syllable of the first, a rounded vowel in the second); for me, they are homophones (with an unrounded vowel in both), which blunts the effect of the joke.

The history and dialectology of low back vowels in English is extraordinarily complex; the Wikipedia entry on the phonological history of the English has a detailed account of the situation, taken from scholarly sources.

With respect to the low back vowels, Chris’s variety of English approximates British RP (“Received Pronunciation”), where there are three phonemically distinct vowels in this phonetic space:

an unrounded long vowel (in father and cart);

a rounded long vowel (in law and caught);

a rounded short vowel (in bother and cot).

My system in this domain is a subtype of GA (“General American”), which has two phonemically distinct vowels:

an unrounded long vowel (in father, bother, and cot; my variety is rhotic, so cart is not directly relevant here);

a rounded long vowel (in law and caught).

Note that I don’t generally have the cot/caught merger that is fairly widespread in American English (usually in favor of an unrounded vowel), but like many GA speakers, I have the merger in some words. As it happens, log is one of them; I have a rounded vowel in dog, but an unrounded vowel in log and also logger (and for some words I have alternative pronunciations), though many GA speakers have a rounded vowel in all three words.

So logger and lager end up being homophones for me (but a minimal pair for Chris Waigl).

(Note: normally I allow comments on this blog, but I’m closing them for this posting, because my experience is that the topic provokes a cascade of unproductive comments about people’s pronunciations of specific words. It’s well known that there are a great many varieties and sub-varieties of English in the domain of low back vowels; that there’s also variation in the treatment of specific words; and that all this variation is associated — but not rigidly — with geography, social class, age, and other non-linguistic factors. Information from particular people about particular words doesn’t advance our knowledge, entertaining though it may be to exchange anecdotes about the way we talk.)

Zippy humor

A weekend cartoon.

I usually “get” Zippy cartoons — some people are just baffled by them — but here’s one where I don’t see the point; in particular, I don’t see why it’s called “The Best-Seller Principle”:

Any suggestions from the readership?

Phrase repetition disorder

Every so often, Zippy and Zerbina get into a groove of repeating phrases. This time it’s Zerbina, stuck on the remarkable phrase “post-prandial sneeze disorder”:

Parallel universes

In Zippy’s parallel universe, some things are backwards, some upside-down:

Labels

Rhymes With Orange takes on labeling:

The amount of writing on and public discussion of labels, of all sorts, is enormous. There’s constant contention over the way labels frame things — as in the panda’s objection above to breeding center.

Labels in socially sensitive domains — like sex, sexuality, race, ethnicity, religion, and so on — are especially fraught. There’s tension between avoiding giving offense and sounding ridiculous.

A case in point: the language of disability, that is, the language used to describe and refer to people with physical or mental disabilities. I happen to have looked at the Oxford A-Z of English Usage (ed. by Jeremy Butterfield, 2007) on the matter yesterday — with some personal interest, since I have somewhat limited use of my right hand.

(The Oxford A-Z is a small, short paperback that tries to cover not only points of grammar and usage in a narrow sense, but also spelling, pronunciation, punctuation, and more, including word choices in socially sensitive domains.)

First, an entry for differently abled, which the guide (p. 40) says

was first proposed in the 1980s as an alternative to disabled, handicapped, etc. on the grounds that it gave a more positive message and so avoided discrimination towards people with disabilities. The term has gained little currency, however, and has been criticized as both over-euphemistic and condescending. The accepted term in general use is still disabled.

So far so good. I can tell people that I am “somewhat disabled”.

Then comes a longer entry on disability, the language of (pp. 41-43), where (among other things) we are told to try to

avoid using the + an adjective to refer to the whole group, as in the blind, the deaf and so forth. The reasoning behind this is twofold: because the humanity of people with a disability should not be circumscribed by the disability itself (‘the disability is not the person’); and that talking about people with a given disability as a group diminishes their individuality. The preferred formulation these days is ‘a person with …’ or ‘people with …’ as in people with sight problems, people with asthma, or people with disabilities.

So now I am “a person with a disability”, I guess.

I have little patience with these circumlocutions, though I appreciate that there can be subtle differences in meaning and use between different syntactic structures (as in Italians, the Italians, Italian people, people from Italy).

Next, the guide gives a list of suggested replacements for older terms, saying that

Some of the terms below are better established than others, and some groups with disabilities favour specific words over others. These lists are offered only as a general guide.

Some of the “older terms” — like mongol — are certainly ripe for replacement (though person with Down’s syndrome is not especially felicitous). Some replacements are awkward indeed: non-disabled for able-bodied, partially sighted or visually impaired for blind. And having a disability is suggested as the “neutral term” for disabled. Sigh.

Puns for the weekend

To inaugurate the weekend, a little pun package from Hilary Price:

This is a species of pun in which the parts of an idiom are unpacked and interpreted literally (or at least in non-idiomatic senses available for the parts). And, in this case, with an unlikely juxtaposition of ideas.

Zippy Schwippy … uh, Schmippy

Bill Griffith misfires on his Yiddish/Yinglish, and has Zippy producing SCHW-reduplication rather than the normative SCHM-reduplication:

I somehow missed this in my comics feed, but got it in e-mail from Danny Bloom, who posted it in his blog. Bloom wrote Griffith, who understood immediately, saying in reply, “BLOOM! SCHMOOM!”

The eye chart

A nightmare scene from Bizarro: initialism run amok: