The Art of Street Communication

There was a group of people in the main square this morning, shouting and waving flags. There often are. This was supposedly about an ongoing industrial dispute, workers and their company not seeing eye-to-eye.

I wonder, as I often do, who they were expecting to listen to them. I have not followed the details of the dispute, but there is one and they may well be right, or at least, entitled to take action, negotiate, strike, make their case to other people, ask for backing.

But who was listening? Certainly not the people they need to talk to, or anyone who can help them. It is likely they were fooled by union leaders who said this would be useful. It will be, but not to the workers. It might get the union chap in the papers, and help justify his existence and his salary.

So who are they talking to? They were surrounded by anti-democratic symbols, communist flags, anarchist flags, republican flags, waved by the usual hairy layabouts who want to be given other people’s money because it’s easier than working (this is a small place, and I know who many of them are). No normal person is going to be drawn to sympathise, or even to learn more about the dispute, which, as I say, may be legitimate, because of the company they keep. ‘They’ are not talking to anyone.

This is a failure of communication, because the message they want to get across is not the one they are in fact delivering. They have not analysed the context sufficiently and so have allowed other people to deliver a message which will do nothing for the workers. The other big question in communication, after ‘What do you have to say?’ is ‘Who do you want to say it to?’ The workers, the ones with a problem that they are trying to solve, did not seem to have worked it out.

This being La Mancha, the shouting and waving finished at 1.30 and they all went off to drink beer. We are civilised people, after all.

Teaching Huckleberry Finn

There is a specific problem with teaching this book. There is a word in it that some people don’t like. (Most people, in fact). It’s a fine book, a borderline classic. It would be a great shame if people stopped reading it for fear of a word. Is it better to change the word ‘nigger’, where it occurs, to stop publishing the book, remove it from libraries, stop worrying about it, or when encouraging children to read it, explain why it uses that word, and its significance in that context?

Banning books is not civilized, and is almost impossible in practice, anyway.

Changing the word to something else is possible, and has been done before, but it’s a matter for the publisher. The book is out of copyright and freely available in electronic form, and I can’t see Gutenberg or Amazon or anyone else bothering to make that change. Many books have things in them that a lot of people don’t like.

I don’t believe the bad word should be forcibly removed, and the idea of Bowdlerization of any sort does not much appeal. The author wrote what he wrote and he did so for reasons which we cannot always understand, or even know. In the case of Huck Finn, the word is largely used by Huck himself, is not usually derogatory in any way, and it is certainly not an expression of hate.

I have never used the book in class, but I was thinking about it, partly because of some discussion I saw about this very matter. If I did, the word could be used as one of many internal devices for interpreting the internal and external context of the book.

This is great in theory, but the theory would clash rather badly with reality if that reality were a black student in the classroom. There aren’t many here, hardly any in fact, and the word doesn’t have the same cultural implications, but in the English-speaking world, to try to explain that an expression that  a black student has been told all his life means that someone hates you, and that he may well have experienced as such on a number of occasions, that he'll just have to lump it because that's what Twain wrote, is not quite so easy as it sounds.

I imagine it could be handled by asking the students what they think, negotiating among several options. Treating students as responsible, mature people is a good way of helping them to act like it, and to become like it. It would depend on the nature of the class. It's easy for a teacher to conclude that it's not worth the trouble, there are plenty of good books to read. I understand that position, but it can very instructive to work out a way of introducing difficult stuff in the classroom. It invariably means communicating with individuals, which is why it's rewarding for everyone, and why making some blanket policy, or talking in vacuo, doesn't work.

As a result of these idle ponderings I am about to read the book again. My thoughts may appear here in a few days.

Conversation with the Natives

In their constant struggle to improve the quality of education in this country, the relevant authorities forever miss the very point of it, create obstacles when they mean to smooth progress, ignore the people who actually know what needs to be done and how to do it, pay scrupulous attention to the interests of everyone but the children, for whose benefit the system is supposed to exist, and generally create more and more regulation and paperwork to less and less effect.

So it’s quite unusual for someone in government to say something intelligent on the subject. The surprising news in this case is that President Rajoy has suggested that there should be conversation classes with native speakers in schools, to improve the level of English. This is a good idea. If anything comes of it, it will be done badly, ineffectively and at unnecessary expense, but the idea is sound.

First, some background. The focus in Spanish schools is on grammar and vocabulary, because those who decide these things lack imagination and experience, it’s much easier to justify the marks you give if they come from written exams, and it’s difficult to do useful oral activities with groups of 30 or so pupils. Some would see these as problems to be solved. In fact, they tend to be seen as excuses not to try to do things better.

The aim of the recent Education Law is that pupils who leave High School at 18 should have a B1 level of English. For those of you who understand these things, that is Cambridge Pet level, and you will recognize the problem. It is not an independent user level. It is half a language, which is no good. You can’t actually do anything with it that a company, a University, or you yourself, can use. A B1 level does not allow you to answer the interview question ‘Do you speak English?’ with a ‘Yes.’

Also, needless to say, the aspirations of government when they wave their hands about and create these documents are not always fulfilled. Most children don’t even reach the low level that is set as the target. The result is that the great majority of Spanish youngsters leave school with a very limited knowledge of English, a bit of useless baggage that has cost them thousands of hours of wasted time, and doubtless many arguments and punishments along the way. This is not the way to do things.

The idea, though, that the purpose of language is communication, is not really recognized by the system in use. Anything that changes that perception is good. It really is like riding a bike. You are more likely to reach your destination if you actually have somewhere you want to go.

Conversation with Natives

Just to clarify:

Conversation (communication) classes with a native teacher are an important part of the process of learning a foreign language. In the case of younger (preschool or primary) children, this is because the naturalness of the accent* and the prosody (primarily intonation, and this is often underestimated or not understood) contributes greatly to the way the foundation of learning is built. They will mostly be hearing native speakers in the resources used to back up the class, and on the television and in the songs they hear and sing, and the natural rhythms of a native speaker reinforce the memory and the ease of use.

For older students this is much less important, but a native speaker, one who grew up in a cultures where the language was part of life, can provide a much more interesting background to the conversation, which adds a lot to motivation, and leads to real communication.

When I say native teacher, of course, I do mean teacher, not some random unemployed graduate found on the streets of London or Dublin or San Francisco. Teaching is not nuclear physics, but it requires competence and experience.

*it doesn’t matter all that much where it’s from, or what kind of education it denotes, as long as it’s something that most of the English speaking world would understand and accept

Instant Universes in Advertising

The language of advertising, in fact the whole communicative package of advertising, is very interesting. It provides an object that is relatively easy to study, since the only important underlying message is ‘buy this product’. You know that the advert is saying that, and the chances are that it’s saying it very successfully because, although not all adverts are commercially successful, the people who make them are very good at what they do.

There are many ways of representing that basic message, usually involving the creation of some sort of narrative structure, in a single image or a few seconds of film, and it often means providing the mark customer with just enough cues that the cultural baggage they are assumed to have will suffice to let them invent the narrative for themselves. It saves time, but it’s hard to do.

Some adverts go so far as to create that cultural baggage within themselves, in a single sentence or a short sequence of images, planting in the viewer’s mind the necessary assumption on which the whole story is based, where no such assumption existed before. Such adverts don’t so much disappear up their own navels as loop the loop inside it and come shooting out again.

Readers of a certain age will remember adverts for the Electricity Board (I think) which showed scenes of family life and began with the words ‘Sunday breakfast in the kitchen, electric…’ The implication in the phrase, the tone and the image was that it was natural to have breakfast on Sundays all together in the kitchen, which you wouldn’t do the rest of the week. It did a very good job of creating and transmitting the (false) cultural assumption that it needed you to use to interpret the rest of the advert. The real reason for it was that they wanted to have the whole scene set in the kitchen rather than going from there to the dining room, so that you could see the nice shiny electric oven and hotplates, but equally they couldn’t present the idea as new, so it was slid into your brain at the start and then a moment later you found it there, the tool required to interpret the advert in the way they intended, as though it had always been there. It’s clever, and difficult to do. If it’s obvious, it doesn’t work.

Recently there has been an advert on TV here for some kind of yoghourt, premised on the assumption that children are happy drink milk in the morning but not in the afternoon, and they need to drink two glasses a day. This is presented so naturally that you could easily just accept it and start trying to pour yoghourt down your children’s throat. Unless you stop to think, but the clever adverts don’t let you think.

A slightly different version is an advert for a car, from a couple of years ago, which involves a mouse in some way that I don’t recall clearly. At the end, and out of nowhere (I mean it doesn’t emerge from the narrative) there is a voice-over by a middle-aged actress pretending to be a simpering little girl, who says, ‘Daddy, will you buy me the car of Ratoncito Pérez? (a mythical mouse who’s our version of the tooth fairy). In one line it manages to create and implant in the viewer’s mind the entirely false impression that children are naturally referring to this car in that way. Familiarity and confidence in the product swell up manifold within as though attached to a helium cylinder. The mouse in the advert isn’t even intended to be a representation of the Tooth Mouse, it’s just a mouse, but in the final two seconds, almost as an afterthought, they attach the product firmly to a cultural icon, effortlessly forming in your mind an association that you can believe has been there since you were a child. It’s the speed and the finality which make it so interesting. It’s a great trick if you can do it.

Does Literature Exist? Part 5

On the Purpose of Language

The purpose of language, that is, the purpose to which we put it most of the time, is the creation and maintenance of social relations. The vast majority of all communication*, in all media, (spoken, written, whistled, tactile, whatever) is not intended to entertain, inform, persuade, instruct or anything else, it is a negotiation of a shared understanding of the nature of the relations between the people involved, and usually also an enjoyment of those relations.**

Story-telling is, like other uses to which we put speech and communication, an example of an adaptation of an ability for some other end. We didn’t become bipedal so we could play basketball, our dexterity did not evolve because of a selective advantage possessed by piano virtuosi, and the glottis has a purpose not remotely related to the singing of grand opera. And, although story-telling often has a partly social function or context, the type of language used is quite different, on another creative level, from ordinary social communication. It involves the manipulation of newly-created abstract concepts into a pattern that will be perceived as having the possibility of being real, and can be accepted as such. We are so good at doing this that we fail to realise the intellectual challenge it represents.

Literary texts take the intellectual challenge and attempt to refine it in a way that most of us are not capable of imitating. In doing so they (deliberately) distance themselves from the social function which usually forms a part of all communication, even story-telling. That is perhaps where literature is distinct from mere story-telling, a higher and separate entity. In this sense, naturally, literature certainly exists.

In any case, the point of this last post in my rambling mini-series is just to point out that story-telling is not the main purpose for which we use language. And neither is telling the truth.

*By communication I mean an utterance directed at a specific person or group of people. Novels, especially literary novels, articles, and so on, are usually not communication in this sense. Not that it makes much difference to the point.

**(It is possible, but not at all certain, that language originated because of selective pressure on the ability to create strong social groups through verbal communication, but that is not what I am trying to argue here. There are those who suggest, and argue well (see Babel’s Dawn on the blogroll, or his new book which is just out), that it originated in the sharing of an interest in an object, that is, that the motor function was informative rather than social.)

The Queen's English

Real life, in the form of a lot of work and the computer sliding down the curtain have meant no blogging for a while. And even now all I can offer is the worst kind of post, a collection of links and quotes from myself. But anyway, here we are. One of the things I had intended to write about was this, from the Times. (Another, of course, was the football.*)

The Queen's English Society, as you will discover if you take the trouble to peruse their website, are an ignorant, barely literate bunch who think the function of language is to show how clever they are at learning rules, and to express a stupid and sinister kind of nationalism. They have no idea how communication works, or of what English really is, as opposed to how it's spoken down their street and what their old teacher used to upbraid them on years ago. Even if an English Academy were a good idea these would be the very worst people to run it. I even wondered if it might be a send-up of the Plain English Campaign (who seem to have got a lot better recently, by the way, although for some reason they've lost the article), but it isn't. It is actually intended to be taken seriously.

Before I could get round to posting, a lot of other people had already done it: Stan Carey of Sentence First does it here, John Macintyre of the Baltimore Sun does it here (both added to blogroll), and Mark Liberman does it at the Language Log.

Self-quotation time: this is the comment I left at Stan's place:

"‘You can’t make a record if you ain’t got nothing to say,’ as Willy Nelson done sung.

Mr Estinel clearly has nothing to say, and so, having little use for the language as a vehicle of communication, he treats it as an exercise in the application of rules, which he doesn’t seem to understand in any case. Contrast his comments with those of Mr Gorman, who does have something to say and expresses it well (though he might express it better if he ignored the advice of the QES- note the self-conscious avoidance of contracted forms).

Another underlying, and quite wrong, assumption, is that children learn to communicate by being told rules in the classroom. They don’t, they learn by observing how others communicate, trying, failing, trying again, and discovering how different listeners interpret their words.

Another little clue for Mr Estinel: context is everything; and I do mean everthing. When (young) people text, tweet, Messenger, Tuenti, scribble postcards or just talk to each other, much of the language they use is not only non-standard and largely incomprehensible to anyone outside the group, but is in fact mostly meaningless. This is because it’s not intended to convey factual information, but simply to express their pleaure at being together."

and this is what I said at You Don't Say:

"I don't think it's worth taking them remotely seriously. Their website is terrible; it's very poorly written, full of errors and clunking style, it's parochial, predictable and ignorant.

Peevology is a lower-middle class obsession. These are poorly.educated people striving for something to feel snobbish about. By all means laugh at them, but don't worry about them.

Or it could just be about money, a modern form of tele-evangelsim."

They sum up what I don't have time to develop in full.

The main reason there is no point in having an Acandemy of the English Language is that no one would listen to it. Where such Academies exist they provide a rich source of discussion for the sort of people who like to argue about these things, and they make life a lot easier for lazy writers of style manuals, but for the vast majority of speakers, including professional writers and communicators, they are a useless irrelevance. Spain has one, now linked to all the other Spanish-speaking countries that have created similar Academies, and I don't think I have ever used its dictionary or its grammar to determine how I express something (even its spelling is prescriptive). I do use usage manuals and historical dictionaries (and I tend to have Mrs Hickory vet anything that's for publication) and I check terms and expressions and stylistic choices against those used in similar kinds of writing, but the Academy can't help because it doesn't tell you how people communicate in a particular context, it just tells you very broadly how it thinks they should.

As I said before somewhere, language is not in danger because we will always find ways to achieve communication when we want to. In communiction theory (a dry field of linguistics that consists mainly of stating the obvious) a number of sub-competences of the global communicative competence are identified, one of which is the strategic competence, whose role is to identify and solve problems in communication. It varies from person to person, naturally, but we all have it, and anyone whose intellectual and social skills are superior to Robert Green's goalkeeping instinctively knows how to do it.

*I haven't watched either of England's games at the World Cup (or Spain's, for that matter) and I can't get too depressed that we haven't been able to beat a couple of teams that don't know one end of a ball from the other. Footie in the summer doesn't seem to matter, even if the cricket is a bit weak this year.

But one thing that strikes me is that someone has clearly made a fortune by convincing South Africans not only that football has always been an inseparable part of their culture, but also that they have always watched it while blowing loudly on an overpriced plastic trumpet. I bet they didn't use them five years ago. A triumph of marketing, but then, there's one born every minute. (And also, football is fun. That's the point of it. It's why we watch it. It doesn't have to make sense or be historically accurate.)

The Decay of Language Part 2

There are two main threads to the ‘language is decaying’ argument. One laments the fact that some people do not use the terms, meanings, pronunciations or structures that we learnt when we were young. The other suggests that the effectiveness of the language for communication will be impaired if a certain change or changes is ‘allowed’ to happen. Neither is a serious problem. Language use changes more or less randomly over time, and is widely different across regions, ages, classes and professions. This doesn't stop people understanding each other when they wish to. Differences in education, knowledge, cultural reference and interests are more likely to cause difficulties than differences in the way words and structures they have in common are used.

Meaning is constantly being negotiated, even during the course of a single conversation, and much more so across wider linguistic communities. But the young and the old, the British and the Nigerians, the Metropolitan professional and the rural worker, those with backgrounds in the sciences and those from the humanities, even left-wingers and right-wingers, may not belong to one linguistic community in any meaningful way, despite sharing a mother tongue and perhaps even a hometown. When they speak to each other, neither uses the language they would naturally use when speaking to those they instinctively feel are 'like them.' Each seeks a form of accommodation, a way of making the communication work, with greater or lesser effort depending on how much interest they have in it. Most of us are capable of speaking with a range of styles, registers, semantic fields and even accents, according to the communicative context, and we think nothing of it.

While there are enough people in constant communication with each other in sufficiently varying groups a language will not decay; it will only change. Those changes will leave some people mildly confused while others assimilate them completely without even realizing it. But language will decay if it ceases to be used for literary or academic purposes, or if it ceases to be written at all, or if those who use it do so for a very limited range of purposes, or or if it becomes solely a literary or academic language, no longer used for real communication at all, or if the groups who use it are too small or too isolated. Then it can lose plasticity, expressive power, or comprehensibilty between groups.

The problem with trying to impose standards in language is that nobody really listens to you. For most of human history it hasn't mattered and, except in certain specific forms of communication, they don't matter very much now. Communication in everyday life is as much about seeking ways of understanding each other as it is about exchanging information. We create standards as we go,for the times when we need them.

George Lakoff- a Non-Rant

George Lakoff is one of the big names in cognitive linguistics, and one of his big things is the role of metaphors not only in language and communication, but in cognition itself.

He is a linguistician, and what he discusses is mostly within his field of expertise; this isn't a post about how he's talking a load of nonsense about things he doesn't understand (though he should be a bit more careful when talking about mathematics, which I may come back to sometime). Also, the paper linked to is only an introduction to the ideas developed in the book, and is intended to provide some background and some examples to get the thing moving. It is not meant to be rigorous, which is fortunate really, because it has too many holes to be a true theoretical foundation for anything.

No, my beef with Lakoff is not really a beef a all, merely a few comments about what he says:

- Argument is war: there are many expressions used-he gives a list- which conceive of argument in these terms, and although he concedes in an aside that the concept of argument os only partially structured in these terms, he immediately states that this is the normal way of understanding argument, viz. as a form of war.

He seems to be overegging this considerably. At the level of conceptual metaphor we could equally construct an understanding of war in terms of argument, and there is, of course, a reason for this. Argument and war share the idea of difference and disagreement. Once that is understood, it becomes clear (if it wasn't already) that we think of argument as conflict, contest, competition, confrontation, difference, sport, and many other things, depending on context, the only common characteristic is that two people are not in initial agreement. (Even this is not strictly true, in that argument can at times be a form of solitaire.) There is no intrinsic need, and the metaphors do not always have or require, the idea of violence, bloodshed, physical battle.

Many of the expressions he gives, though possibly miltary in origin, are commonly used with no martial sense, and so there is no metaphor of war, but rather one of sport or game, or the underlying metaphor may be argument itself. Examples of this are 'target', 'strategy', even 'win' and 'lose' themselves. A battle is not, and never has been, the only thing that can be won or lost, and whether it is the first think we think of when we use them depends on our social and cultural circumstances, and the context of the use.

- Time is money: this one is even easier to deal with. Time is conceived as having value because it does have value. Yes, we can earn money with it, but we can also do many things that add value to our lives (what they are will depend on each one of us, but they may obviously include studying, reading, fun, entertainment, family and friends, wine, women, song, sex, drugs, rock'n'roll, quiet contemplation of the world or of one's navel, even Celebrity Big Brother on a Desert Island with Optional Ballroom Dancing). These thing have value in the same way that money does, and time is what allows us to do them.

Time is very strictly limited, and if you need reminding of that there's a chap with a scythe I'd like you to meet. Time has value, as money has value. It isn't even a metaphor. Time has almost certainly been valued for longer than money has existed. And 'spend' doesn't work in many languages, which is a minor quibble, but too typical of the anglo-centric school of linguistics.

- Transport studies- the conduit metaphor: this is the one that I frequently have professional dealings with, as it were. We tend to think of communication in terms of wrapping a message into a parcel in our brains, sending it on a journey from our mouth to the ear, and then the brain, of the listener. It is certainly true that we conceive it this way, and it is undoubtedly a metaphor. Many of the expressions listed by Lakoff bear this out. Wittgenstein pointed this out, and Michael Reddy is one of those who developed the idea, and tried to discover why it is so pervasive and persuasive, at least in English.

It isn't easy to think of counter-examples, that is, expressions we use, metaphorical or otherwise, which use a different underlying image, but they do exist. We speak of 'bringing to mind', 'I want you to think about', 'imagine', 'I couldn't make him see' and so on, which conceive of communication as a way of directly creating an image in the mind of the listener, not sending it on a little Platonic carriage from one brain to the other.

This is, I think, the best metaphorical foundation for Lakoff's later work as set out in the book, and probably the one he understood best as well, given his background. It might even have been the one he started from and would have liked to stick to, but he thought he should broaden the scope of the examples before developing a theoretical framework.

Dr Johnson's Aardvark

It is variously said, including in Blackadder I think, that Samuel Johnson's Dictionary both does and does not include the words 'aardvark' and 'sausage'. Well, having finally got around to doing a little research I can confirm that 'aardvark' is not there but 'sausage' is.

This is perhaps not surprising, since, although the Dutch were in southern African over a hundred years before Dr Johnson published his magnum opus, and had presumably given their own name to the animal by then, the word did not enter the English language until British settlers arrived at the beginning of the 19thC. The earliest quote in the OED is from 1833, and curiously, the second edition of the OED (1989) still considers it to be a non-naturalized word, and hyphenates it (as aard-vark). The taxonomic information it gives is also known now to be highly inaccurate, since it is not a close relative of the anteater at all, but rather it belongs, as confirmed by DNA analysis, to the fascinating superorder Afrotheria, which also, rather surprisingly, includes the elephants, shrews, tenrecs, manatees, dugongs and hiraxes. Lots of rapid change going on there.

'Sausage' is recorded in English from the 15thC (the product is much older, and probably the word as well) and comes from the Latin salsicus-a, via the Vulgar Latin and the Norman French, whence the conversion of the lateral to a close back vowel (something similar happens in some London speech, where 'balls' becomes /bouz/).

I can't find a reliable etymological dictionary of Dutch or Afrikaans, to see how early the word 'aardvark' is, but it is safe to assume that it was coined in the late 17thC. All of which explains why I never get anything done, since a casual mention of a word has got me spending half the afternoon researching all this. The good thing is that, being 'Homo blogens', I don't have to let it go to waste.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year to everyone. Let's make it a good one, work hard and have a bit of luck, keep reminding politicos and bureaucrats who's really in charge, drink, smoke, eat chocolate or play sport to your heart's content, think for yourself, do what you want but be considerate to others, and take responsibilty for your actions. It's the road to freedom and fulfilment.

Your humble blogging hedgehog is off to Malta for a few days, with Mrs Hickory. It's more rabbit country, really, but the idea is to walk a lot and see a few unusual things. Normal service will be resumed around the 7th.