unhappy medium

magic realism

2008-01-11T09:08:00.000-05:00

Yesterday the Washington Post ran an article about a fascinating language-related development in, of all places, a police department.

In Nezahualcoyotl, a municipality on the outskirts of Mexico City, police supervisors have begun to translate great works of Spanish-language literature from Spanish ... into Cop Spanish. The idea originally came about when supervisors were bemoaning the lack of interest in the tutoring program they had established to help educate its officers, many of whom never even finished high school. At first, the program was the educational equivalent of pulling teeth. But then they got clever.

They decided to start incorporating local police code into the program. A regional chief translated Don Quixote, and, all of a sudden, there was a surge of interest in reading. Police officers began to ask for books. And by the time this article was researched, they were happily discussing One Hundred Years of Solitude - and participating in classes where phrases like "Destroy the narrative line!" were bandied about.

Read the full article here (registration may be required) - it's well worth it.

What particularly interests me about this story isn't, as you might think, the structure of Mexican Police Code, but rather the pedagogical strategy at work. Which is to say this: "Don't dumb it down; just make it accessible."

I mean, Don Quixote and One Hundred Years of Solitude aren't exactly pieces of proverbial cake. Hell, I don't think I could tell you what the hell even happened in One Hundred Years of Solitude - I remember a woman eating mud? Is that right?

The point is that these are gutsy choices. And the genius of it is that it sets a really important tone right from the start: "We think you're smart." So often I come across non-fiction that pretends to want to impart information but treats the reader as inferior right from the get-go. The tone in these cases is "I think I'm smarter than you, and I shall deign to acquaint you with my vast intelligence."

I'm thinking, of course, of language books. Specifically, books about advanced English usage. Even more specifically, a certain book that features pandas and punctuation.

While I thoroughly enjoyed Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, I was deeply unsettled by the tone. Although I'm sure it was exaggerated for comic effect, Truss's disdain for those unacquainted with proper punctuation really put me off. Because it seemed to me that she wasn't writing a book to instruct the uninitiated with regard to apostrophes, but rather that she was writing a book to instruct the initiated with regard to mocking the uninitiated.

And then, she complains that some people don't know any better - and, horror! - that these people don't know any better despite the presence of her book, which would obviously set them straight.

Well: duh. Who wants to read a book that belittles them? And let me say this: just because someone hasn't acquired a knack for commas doesn't mean that they're impossibly stupid. Jesus, people. I cringe at a punctuation error like many others, but that's because I work as a copyeditor. It is, from time to time, my job to cringe at punctuation errors. And if I see a sign that's been professionally error-ridden, I get mad, because one of my colleagues is out there doing a shitty job. But do I assume that just because someone slips an its/it's error into an email that they're somehow subhuman? No.

I have limited classroom experience, having formally taught in only two situations: last year I volunteered as a tutor, and during my brief stint in grad school, I was the TA in a course on Middle Eastern government and politics.

(Which was particularly absurd because I knew absolutely nothing about Middle Eastern government and politics - my focus was East Asia. But apparently for my departmental coordinator, one non-European culture was as good as the next. Plus ça change....)

So I can't say that I really understand first-hand the practicalities of teaching. But I am an overeducated swot who comes from a family of teachers, which means that I actually spend a great deal of time thinking about the mechanics of education. And this is what I believe: oftentimes there's an initial hurdle to learning, kind of a barrier to entry, if you will. Study, frankly, can be scary. However, the solution to that doesn't have to be bar-lowering. Instead, try enjoyment-raising - the metaphorical equivalent of setting up a trampoline. Make your teaching witty, make your teaching entertaining, but above all, make your teaching respectful. Because if you don't respect your students from the get-go, I guarantee that unless your students are the type who crave positive pedagogical feedback (in which case they probably don't need any encouragement to study, as this is a key trait of the classic teacher's pet), they will shut down and stop listening.

In fact, unless you're actually in a school, don't even think of your students as students at all - because they don't have to be there. And you don't have any authority over them, no matter how much of a megalomaniac you might be. Instead, think of them as customers - and you have to fight for them.

There's a difference between willfully stupid and willed-to-be stupid. I have nothing but contempt for one and compassion for the other. I leave it to you to figure out which is which.

morituri te salutamus

2008-01-08T09:08:00.000-05:00

While I was watching television last night, I couldn't help but wonder: is HBO's slightly irritating high-brow marketing strategy to blame for The Wire's piddling ratings share? (I'm convinced, by the way, that the marketing strategy was pitched something like this: "We have a great show on our hands: it's energetic, emotional, entertaining - I know! Let's only focus on talking about how complicated and impossible to follow it is. Then we'll snag that coveted 35-to-pretentious demo. Victory!")

The reason I couldn't help but wonder was this: I was watching American Gladiators. Which had an extremely promising Nielsen debut on Sunday night and probably had nearly as many viewers on Monday. So in between the important intellectual tasks of trying to figure out if the Travelator is fixed or exactly how old Wolf is, my brain was doing something like this: American Gladiators, many viewers! The Wire, not so many viewers! American Gladiators, many viewers! The Wire, not so many viewers!

Eventually, the solution to The Wire's rating problems became clear:

play or get played

2008-01-04T12:34:00.000-05:00

I'm finally emerging from a three-week cluster-fuck of publicity, international travel, and familial interaction, each of which exhaust me to a similar degree, which is to say completely. Next week I'll have belated dispatches from Budapest, thoughts on Hungarian, and a sneak peek at the awesomely cracked-out 2008 calendar I got from my local grocery store.

Nothing, however, deserves my first-post-of-the-new-year slot so much as this: The Best Show on Television. The fifth and final season of The Wire premieres this Sunday on HBO, and I feel that it's my duty as someone who typically watches upwards of 80 hours of television a week to do my own small grass-roots part and remind people to set their TiVos or DVRs or VCRs or even - gasp! - to make a note to actually sit down at 9pm and watch the thing like back in the old days. (And if you have HBO OnDemand, you'll find that the season premiere is already available for viewing.)

The Wire is so much better than anything else on television that some might consider it an insult to call it mere television. But I'm Midwestern, earnest, and full of a surprising amount of optimism after the results of last night's caucus (on the Democratic side, in any case), so I choose instead to think that The Wire is one of the few shows that actually does my idea of "television" justice.

Initially, I resisted The Wire as a starlet eschews sobriety. Which surprises even me, in retrospect, because the great Homicide: Life on the Street (another David Simon and Ed Burns project) was a defining show for me growing up. True story: I once wrote a short story for my freshman English class about an imagined interrogation between a serial killer and Andre Braugher's Detective Pembleton. But in the early years of The Wire's run, I was far too emotionally invested in Six Feet Under to consider trying out another of HBO's serial offerings, no matter how sentimental I might have been about the series creators.

Then, last year, the fourth season of The Wire really, finally started to garner some serious mainstream attention. Which, for me, had the opposite effect of that intended: I was just plain put off. I felt like I was being force-fed by ostentatiously liberal TV critics, the kind of critics who were just so thrilled to be championing a show about the inner city, because that made them so fucking real, yo. So many of those pieces felt to me like lady-doth-protests-too-much pleas by the super-white and super-privileged. Like, "We watch The Wire every week! With our black friends - of whom we have many, by the way!"

My response was something along the lines of "Fuck that, I already sat through Crash because of you motherfuckers - and I have me some Wife Swap to watch."

Then, this summer, something amazing happened: my beloved St. Louis Cardinals started sucking. Which opened up a lot of free time for me. So I finally picked up the first season of The Wire.

And: holy shit. When I say Best Show on Television, I am not using hyperbole.

Watching The Wire is like watching a 55-minute master class - in acting, in writing, and in the righteous fury of the disenfranchised. And it's not just watchable for its impeccably researched look into the nuts and bolts of the drug trade or law enforcement or city politics. What makes the show so uniquely compelling is its startling depth of human compassion coupled with its clear-eyed understanding of the inherent brutality of the system, a system that will grind you up and spit you out, no matter what your intentions, no matter what your excuses. You don't just watch the characters on The Wire, you love them - no matter how flawed they might be. And you will rage and rage against the forces that keep these characters so impossibly down.

Because this show is as real as it gets, and if you don't respond on a visceral level to that realness, then I might suggest that you double-check to make sure you're not some sort of early model replicant.

Case in point: my favorite character is Omar Little (no relation), a gay stick-up artist/legend/poet/assassin. The law would label him a murderer. And a lesser show would make him a villain. But on The Wire, Omar takes his mother to church every Sunday. He treats Butchie, the blind bar owner, like his own father. And he loves Honey Nut Cheerios. Every episode, I root for Omar. But I don't root for his redemption necessarily. Nor do I necessarily cheer him on in his more criminal behavior. I just want him alive and living free and honest. In season four he argues that the truth means something, telling Detective (The Bunk) Moreland that "a man's got to have a code." I want him to have the chance to keep on living by that code.

But, in the end, what The Wire has done for me is much more than turn me on to a bad-ass, brilliant homosexual. Which, since this is me we're talking about, is pretty much the definition of shooting fish in a barrel. (Related aside: I would argue that the privileged white version of Omar is Greg House. Discuss.) What the Wire has done for me is, in fact, the greatest gift I could ask for: it got me thinking again.

Let me explain, in the aforementioned earnest Midwestern style:

I grew up in St. Louis, which, along with Detroit, is right up there with Baltimore in the competition for most fucked-up urban environment. Whenever the year's crime stats come out, friends and acquaintances invariably ask me what it was like for me living in what the numbers seem to indicate is basically an out-and-out war zone. Here's the thing, though: I hardly saw that side of the city.

I was born and raised just outside the city limits, in a place called University City. Many might argue (and many have argued) that U-City isn't nearly as sheltered as other St. Louis suburbs. After all, it does abut the city proper, and it's also an area that seems to be a poster city for racial diversity - it's about half black and half white. In St. Louis county, it has a reputation for being progressive and open-minded and even a little bit dangerous. When I was in elementary school, the mother of a classmate once expressed concern to my mother that we lived in an area with so many potential "criminal elements." (I leave it to you to read between those lines.)

So usually, U-City residents are crown-to-toe top-full with pride for their vibrant, diverse community. President Clinton even came to speak in front of our city hall when I was in high school, praising all of us for coexisting so well. Yay, us!

Except for this one small detail. There are two main east-west corridors in U-City: Delmar and Olive boulevards. North of Olive, the white population falls to nearly nothing. South of Delmar, the same thing happens to the black population.

In other words - in honest words - U-City is in fact a poster city not for diverse coexistence, but instead for the country-wide trend of micro-segregation that county-level census data so cleanly covers up.

What I thought was better was actually worse: because I had no excuse, no excuse whatsoever for being so blind to the realities of my city. I thought that I understood the city because I was in a nominally diverse environment, because I had friends of many colors, because I played basketball with a bunch of girls from the city in some seriously shitty neighborhoods. But the truth is this: I lived a mile away from urban heartbreak for eighteen years and was able to pretty much ignore everything that was going on around me - the crime, the poverty, the drugs, the deteriorating schools.

And then - then! - I moved to New York. And once again praised myself for living in diverse areas, moving from nearly inner-city to outer-borough. And I was doing the exact same thing, keeping my head down while wrapping my progressive neighborhood identity around me like a complimentary PBS-pledge-drive muffler.

It took The Wire to give me a good, hard kick in the hypocrisy.

Now don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that I'm now, like, down with the thug life or whatever. I don't run a drug-outreach program or write about the institutional inequalities in the nation's schools or lobby for changes in the nation's foster-care programs. I write about language and books and television. Let's be honest: in the grand scheme of things, I'm just another sheltered, privileged asshole. But now I'm seeing things I wasn't seeing before. I'm a little more aware.

And I'm thinking more and more - which is what, in my heart of hearts, I believe the best television - the best art - should do.

Thinking isn't doing; thinking isn't changing. But it's a good first step.

So make a New Year's resolution and watch the goddamn show already. Because if you think being a mile away from the realities of the American City and still managing to ignore them is reprehensible, recalculate that equation based on the distance from your couch to your TV and see how you feel then.

snowblind

2007-12-13T18:27:00.000-05:00

In light of the first big snowfall of the year (and because I had a long time to think about various language-related topics as my car crept from Harvard Square to Brookline over the course of ninety minutes this afternoon), I thought it only appropriate to bring up one of the most infamous bits of bad language intelligence.

I refer, of course, to the notion that the Eskimo language has 10/20/50/100/a bajillion words for snow.

It might make for a lovely lede, but the truth of the matter is this: Eskimo does not have a bajillion words for snow. In point of fact, there isn't even really a language called "Eskimo."

Take a look at the Ethnologue listing for members of the Eskimo-Aleut language family here:

Aleut (USA)
Inupiatun, North Alaskan (USA)
Inupiatun, Northwest Alaska (USA)
Inuktitut, Eastern Canadian (Canada)
Inuktitut, Western Canadian (Canada)
Inuktitut, Greenlandic (Greenland)
Yupik, Pacific Gulf (USA)
Yupik, Central (USA)
Yupik, Central Siberian (USA)
Yupik, Naukan (Russia (Asia))
Yupik, Sirenik (Russia (Asia))

Granted, all but Aleut could be classified as "Eskimo" - but notice that none are, in fact, called "Eskimo." So when you say "the Eskimo language," you might as well be saying "the Romance language," which means ultimately that you might as well just be spouting general nonsense.

After all, if the word "bajillion" is not the least straightforward and transparent word in a sentence, you know you're in some real trouble.

The truth of the matter, no matter what your average language-indifferent trivia buff may tell you, is that the Eskimo-Aleut languages do not have a crazy high number of words for snow - I believe the number of words in Greenlandic Inuktitut for snow is about twelve. I would quote exact numbers with more authority here, but sadly I don't currently have access to any Eskimo-Aleut dictionaries or any of my usual language books. Although I did pick up an extremely promising-looking guide to Manchu while in Cambridge yesterday. (It's a sickness, it really is.)

But to find out more (and more specifics) about the reasons why the Eskimo language myth has become so prevalent, I highly recommend reading the titular essay of Geoffrey Pullum's great and memorable collection, The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, in which Professor Pullum efficiently and brilliantly cuts to the heart of the matter - and manages to get in a few entertaining digs at poor Benjamin Whorf's expense as well.

But even though the linguistic community has long been aware that the Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax is just that - a hoax - popular media persists in using it like an amateur chef with an excess of fresh parsley.

Which brings me to my point: if you're currently stuck at home, watching the slush or sleet or flurries or flakes piling up outside your window, do your own small part to subvert mass misconception. If your friends or relatives try to tell you that if they lived in Greenland, they'd have many more ways to describe the stuff they're going to bitch about having to shovel out their driveways the next morning, don't agree with them. Instead, ask them this: if the Eskimos having bajillions of words to describe snow says something important about their culture, what does it say about Americans who have bajillions of words for "complain"?

(Whine, bitch, moan, complain, grouse, grumble, bleat, fuss, bleat, carp, moan, snivel, gripe, kvetch, bellyache, crab, bemoan, bewail, grouch - luckily, this is something that I don't need a dictionary for.)

Happy digging!

boston ruins

2007-12-12T11:06:00.000-05:00

When people ask me what's the most important thing when learning a new language, the response I give over and over is this: don't be afraid to get things wrong.

If only that sentiment applied to everything. Like, oh, say, driving in Boston.

I've been in Boston now for less than twenty-four hours, and I've already managed to get lost about fifteen separate times. "How is this possible?" you might ask. "Didn't you live in Boston for, like, five years?"

It's possible because a map of Boston looks something like this:

That's right. The streets of Boston might very well have been made with house paint and cigarette butts. It's a wonder Clement Greenberg managed to resist its allure.

And if the lack of city grid weren't already enough of a challenge, then there are Boston drivers to take into consideration. Now, I have to admit that I have nothing but respect for Boston drivers. They are downright malicious, yes, but they're also skilled, which is a refreshing change from the drivers of my childhood, who tend to be downright dumb. (My favorite stretch of Highway 40 in St. Louis is a curve near Clayton Road where everybody inevitably slows down in evening rush-hour traffic because the road suddenly points due west. As if it's a huge surprise every single day that the sun is actually setting in that direction.)

That being said, I've been coddled by three years of New York City driving, having gotten used to things like buses that actually signal before cutting you off, and I nearly died at least three times today.

Which is probably why I keep getting lost, because I'm too busy focusing on NOT DYING to look at my map.

In language, if you get something wrong, you risk nothing more than public embarrassment. When driving in Boston, though, you risk your very life and limb.

Which is to say: God help me because I have three more days left in this city.

to my reader from camarillo, california

2007-12-03T22:20:00.000-05:00

I am so sorry to have disappointed you in your search on the Internet. I realize that you came to my site looking for something - something different, something exciting, something a little bit risque. And then Google sent you to this post, where you found only wrestling.

How you must have despaired to have been let down by our fine friends in Mountain View! Let me tell you this - you are not the first to be foiled by Google. My friend Annie - you probably stumbled across her name in that wrestling post, if your dismay allowed you that much - moved to Mountain View expecting city-wide WiFi. How very wrong she was. Almost as wrong as you were when you clicked on that link to unhappymedium.com.

I, too, am to blame for this regrettable state of affairs. I cannot possibly satisfy everyone in the wild swarm of cyberspace. And, like Katie Holmes faced with an objective analysis of her career options in the absence of an A-list husband, I've made my peace with it. But it hurts me to think that someone sought me out, taking care to type three carefully chosen words into a search engine, only to find something so unexpected - and so very, very yellow.

So my apologies to you, dear reader, for being reckless with my words, for not realizing that a few sentences dashed off in the heat-of-the-WWE-moment could have misled not only the Google webcrawlers, but also you. And I so dearly hope, the next time you wade into these Internetted waters, that you are not discouraged - and that you indeed find what you are looking for.

Even if that thing is "pre ejaculation diaper."

All my blogging best,
Elizabeth

for the children

2007-12-03T15:03:00.000-05:00

I almost forgot to mention this: I wrote an essay for Powell's, the Mt. Olympus of independent bookstores, which you can find here. I get all soul-searching and thoughtful - and don't swear once. Under-17 readers, rejoice!

press round-up

2007-12-03T14:05:00.000-05:00

Since I don't want to bore you all with constant press updates, I've added a sidebar link over there on the left if you feel like reading various mentions about ye olde Tadpole in the press. New additions today include round-up reviews from the Newark Star-Ledger and the Boston Globe.

The book also got a (slightly misleading but welcome all the same) mention in a delightful column by Ontario writer Ian Gillespie - which, my Canadian representative (read: my dad) informs me, ran in all of Rupert Murdoch's Canadian papers. Media conglomeration: working for me!

Anyway, the best part of the column is this:

The BBC reported that things recently went wobbly at Wembley Stadium when British opera singer Tony Henry belted out a somewhat distorted version of the Croatian national anthem.

Henry was performing the anthem Lijepa Nasa Domovino (Our Beautiful Homeland) before the start of a European Championship qualifying soccer game between England and Croatia.

Unfortunately, Henry erred on the last line of the second verse. He should have sung, "Mila kuda si planina," which roughly means, "You know, my dear, how we love your mountains."

Instead he sang, "Mila kura si planina," which translates into, "My dear, my penis is a mountain."

Oops.

"If I have offended any Croatians, then they have my deepest apologies," Henry said later. "The last thing I would do is brag about my (private) parts like that."

Read the full column here.

This reminds me of a time my senior year when our Headmaster was observing my AP French class. We were spending the class working on our conversational skills, and my friend Kelly was telling some story that - for what reason I cannot possibly remember - involved talking about how much she yawns. "I yawn," in French, is je bâille. Unfortunately, Kelly confused bâiller with another word, baiser. Which she repeated again and again and again: "Je baise, je baise, je baise."

I fuck, I fuck, I fuck.

My teacher nearly hyperventilated she was laughing so hard. When the headmaster asked what was so funny, she just waved her hands and said "Oh, it doesn't really translate."

Sometimes, lost in translation isn't always a bad thing.

my favorite part of battlestar: razor so far (which is really saying a lot)

2007-11-29T17:54:00.000-05:00

just occurred, shockingly, during a commercial break.

Here be spoilers - obviously.

And it's even funny for you non-Battlestar fans. Just read the following with an appropriately deep and grave voice, as befits a guy who probably does trailers for, like, gritty Clint Eastwood Oscar fare (as opposed to schlocky Clint Eastwood Oscar fare):

"It's been revealed: Helena Cain and Gina Inviere are lovers."

(beat)

"Brought to you by Quiznos. Mmm mmm mmm mmm mmm! Toasty!"

Now: to figure out how to make this my cellphone ringtone....

drive-by

2007-11-27T23:30:00.000-05:00

Greetings from beautiful Wheeling, West Virginia! Which I am visiting on account of it being almost halfway between St. Louis and New York and on account of me being crazy enough to think that driving home for Thanksgiving was a good idea.

I had a wonderful if busy time back in St. Louis, but I'm looking forward to getting back to New York, having the chance to blog about something other than publicity, and for the love of all that's holy finally being able to watch Razor.

Until then, a few quick things:

1. My email at unhappymedium.com is ten kinds of wonky. If you've emailed me in the past week and a half or so and I haven't responded, I am so sorry. I just fixed my incoming mail and only just read your email tonight. However: I haven't yet been able to figure out how to route my outgoing mail through an smtp server that isn't my home ISP, so I cannot respond. If anyone has any ideas on how to fix this, feel free to email me! You'll know if your idea worked if I'm able to write you back. As soon as I'm back in Queens, though, I promise particularly witty responses for all those who have written me.

2. Only I would go back to my old high school to talk about language and writing and end up ranting for ten minutes about Crash.

3. If your last name is Raper, you should: change your name. You should not: publicize your RV dealership with dozens and dozens of billboards along I-70 that proclaim "Tom Raper Country." Because I guarantee that "Tom" is not the first word that motorists will see. While driving through Indiana this evening it took me three separate stops to find a gas station I was willing to go into by myself.

4. My hotel in Wheeling only had two rooms still available when I checked in tonight. As I was chatting with the nice man at the front desk (something I would normally be too shy to do, but he was reading A Clash of Kings, which outed him a fellow fantasy nerd), he told me that Tuesdays and Wednesdays are their busiest nights. I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THIS.

5. Even less explicable: Mizzou is ranked #1 in college football. Anyone who isn't from Missouri might not understand how completely insane this is. Imagine Ethan Hawke winning a Nobel Prize in literature. That insane.

6. Raper. Raper.

radio days

2007-11-23T13:17:00.000-05:00

It turns out that I love radio. This is a bit of a surprise to me. I haven't really listened to the radio since I left St. Louis. For me, radio was always something that you listened to in the car, and once I moved to the East Coast, I stopped driving and stopped listening to the radio except for 1010 WINS, whose jingle warms the cockles of my cold, cold heart. (And, by the way, inspired one of the greatest NYC-centric pick-up lines I've ever heard: "Give me twenty-two minutes, and I'll give you the world.")

Exactly how unfamiliar am I with radio? This unfamiliar: on Tuesday, when I went to KWMU, the St. Louis NPR affiliate, I walked through a hallway that was filled with photos of NPR's most famous radio hosts. And it was the first time that I realized that Terry Gross was a woman. I actually did a double-take.

So, being new to the whole public-radio scene, I was more than a little nervous about the prospect of doing an hour-long interview for KWMU. But I ended up having a wonderful time, chatting about language, complaining about my ruthless rejection from the CIA, and talking to listeners who called in to tell stories or ask questions. I even learned a few things - who knew that there were spelling bees in Belgium?

In any case, the complete interview is available here, on KWMU's website. Many of the callers have some great anecdotes, and one in particular (about a mistranslation involving the Pope) is truly unmissable. Also: I sing. Briefly. Consider yourselves forewarned.

pop candy

2007-11-15T14:57:00.000-05:00

Many thanks to Whitney Matheson, who had some very nice things to say about Biting the Wax Tadpole over at her USA Today blog, Pop Candy:

"This is a fun book for grammar and pop-culture lovers alike (and yes, it's possible to love both!). Little provides grammar basics and little-known facts by incorporating stories of her travels, Star Wars, Dr. Seuss and other familiar icons. It's both a breezy read and a useful resource that informed me a lot about languages around the world."

See the full post here!

(Note also that Whitney's outfit in her photo is exactly what I am wearing right now. Except one of my black socks is longer than the other. Because that's how I roll. By which I mean today is laundry day.)

shelf awareness

2007-11-14T17:04:00.000-05:00

Those of you who aren't in the book business might not know about Shelf Awareness, a newsletter that goes out to about 12,000 subscribers, many of them the kick-ass folks who own and operate independent bookstores, doing their part to help keep the book world diverse, challenging, and cutting-edge. The newsletter is by subscription only, but if you're interested in keeping abreast of book-related goings-on, I highly recommned taking a look. Of course, I also recommend them because they printed a little essay of mine about books and booksellers in other languages. Find a friend with a subscription to check it out!

(I realize that I'm going overboard on the exclamation points these days. All I can ask is that you bear with me while I seek help.)

fear factor

2007-11-13T10:45:00.000-05:00

So: my book is now available for purchase. Today was originally the official on-pub date, but as of last week it started showing up in a few stores, and Amazon is now shipping copies (to everyone but my mother, it seems). Which means that for the next few weeks, I will cease to be a writer and instead become something absolutely terrifying: a talker.

I'm under no illusions. I am absurdly, insanely lucky. I have, pretty much, my dream job. (Well, the writing part is, anyway. The freelance editing I do to keep me in text messages and crappy health insurance is rather less than dreamy.) But one of the things I love best about writing is that I get to do it in my apartment, by myself, in silence. Or near-silence, depending on how frustrated I am with a given passage.

In print, I am open and outgoing - probably too outgoing, actually. In person, though, I am painfully shy. I can hide it sometimes. Or I can dampen it with the magic of sweet, sweet alcohol. But I can never completely get rid of it. And there's not much that scares me more than having to stand in front of a crowd of people and entertain them. (In one of my masochistic periods, I contemplated trying my hand at stand-up comedy as a way to cure myself. Then I realized that any comedy set I would do would basically be a combination of Andrew Dice Clay, Jerry Seinfeld, and Jay Leno - that is: profane, obvious, and unfunny.)

But today I have to just get the fuck over myself. Because I have my first radio interview in like a half an hour, and although I gazed longingly at the Negro Modello in the fridge when I woke up, it's a little too early for liquid courage. Then, later this afternoon, I have my first newspaper phone interview. The real crunch starts next week, when I leave for St. Louis to do a bunch of local publicity. I'll be doing readings, more interviews, and even an event at my old high school.

However, as much as I dread the prospect of putting myself on display, this is one thing I am not worried about: being entertaining. Because these early interviews and readings are going to be rocky, rocky things. You know all that dead air during the TBS baseball broadcasts? Yeah, like that. Except instead of being able to watch a ball fly out, you'll be able to hear me quietly wanting to die. And if reality TV has taught me anything, it's that there's little else that's more entertaining than watching somebody squirm.

So if you're in St. Louis, Boston, or New York for one of my upcoming readings, all I can say is stop on by. It's sure to be a treat.

and now for something actually totally related

2007-10-26T13:18:00.000-04:00

Commenter zhoen pointed out that in my last post I completely failed to reference the seminal language-related Monty Python sketch "The Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook."

Allow me to remedy that immediately:

Also, as I was pulling up this clip, I found a number of clips from the Hungarian show Megasztár (in Hungarian, a "sz" is pronounced like an English "s," while an "s" is pronounced like an English "sh"), an American Idol-like talent competition. How American-Idol-like? This American Idol-like:

I have no clue what they're saying, but I think we can all imagine the gist of it.

This, however, is the strangest clip that YouTubed Megasztár has to offer. It is, as far as I can tell, a mock Megasztár clip featuring ... well, I couldn't really tell you. Cousin It? Playing death-metal? If ever I needed an enticement to learn Hungarian, it is so I can start to understand this:

you say ocd like it's a bad thing

2007-10-26T11:23:00.000-04:00

The three reasons I haven't been keeping up with my writing:

1. The World Series. Not only does it eat up large chunks of my evening, but I also have to find time in the afternoon to catch up on all the primetime TV I would have been watching were I not the sort of person to sit through the entirety of every game, even it's a slow-ass Boston blowout. (I have very strict TV rations. I'm like a Mogwai, except I don't turn Gremlin if you feed me after midnight, only if you keep me from 30 Rock.)

2. Genealogy. Last weekend I had the idea "Hey, I'll make family trees for Christmas!" Cut to me, four days later, like some sort of family-tree-crack addict, hunched over my computer, frantically pulling Scottish and Norwegian census records and ignoring all phone calls except those from my mother. ("Hi sweetie!" "Do you remember great-grandma Mary's maiden name?" "No ...." "I'll talk to you later." Click.) I've never been particularly interested in my ancestors - mostly, admittedly, because my living relatives are a handful enough as is - but that was before the availability of online family-tree-making tools. It's like ... you know the satisfaction of going through your iTunes library and fixing all of the song information so it's perfect and complete and consistent? Building a family tree is like that. Except slightly more emotionally rich.

In any case, I'm going to Ellis Island on Sunday, so I'll write more about this later - particularly as it's looking like I was related to some very bad people back in the day. (By which I mean: turns out I'm secretly part-English. My father almost cried when I told him.) But if you're wondering just how much time a person could possibly spend on such things in the course of the week, I will just say this: I have traced a few lines of the family back to the 900s or so. It's a sickness. Thank god I never got into scrapbooking.

But then I ran out of paper, which meant that I couldn't keep printing out parts of the tree for notetaking purposes, which meant that I had to turn to my next current obsession:

3. Hungarian. I actually haven't succeeded in getting very much studying done in the past couple of weeks, but when I realized that I had less than two months left before my trip (and since someone once told me that "It only takes two years to learn Hungarian - provided they're the first two years"), I figured I'd better get cracking.

If you're wondering how I go about the early stages of learning a language, it is this:

First, I sift through all of the material I have in my own library, which is usually a fair amount. Then, my brain suddenly decides to forget that my apartment is already overrun with books as is, and I go Amazon-crazy, buying any remotely useful-looking grammar or instructional text I can find. Three-to-five days later, buyer's remorse set in as I find myself with a bunch of generally shitty language texts. I do this every time. And every time I get another yellow-labelled copy of Teach Yourself: Whatever, I remember how completely useless it is and wonder what the hell I was thinking. (Short answer: I wasn't. Amazon one-click ordering is going to kill me.)

By the way, the only consistently useful language-learning brand I've found is the Routledge series of grammars. It does vary from language to language (and from edition to edition, as a thoughtful commenter pointed out to me), but the books generally provide a solid introduction to the grammar of a language. The Teach Yourself books, however, are middling at best as instruction and absolutely fucking useless as reference. (Try looking a particular point of grammar up in any of those books. I dare you not to go insane.)

Anyway, after spending my hard-earned editing money on, essentially, bookshelf-filler, I finally remembered my own damn advice and went online. (Taking care to avoid Amazon at all costs.) Basically, if you want to learn a not-entirely-obscure language, the Internet usually has you covered. Wikipedia is usually my first stop, as it has a pretty intense group of linguaphiles who regularly police the language pages, so the grammatical information you find there is relatively trustworthy. (All the same, I highly, highly recommend clicking through to the talk page to see if there are any points of debate.) Also, if you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you'll usually find a collection of language-learning links to help you in your studies.

The two main resources I'm using for this project are Magyaróra, a pretty amazingly comprehensive collection of Hungarian study materials, and the old State Department teaching texts and tapes, which can be can found here. The State Department materials aren't new (which is the reason they're so conveniently in the public domain), but I've had good luck with them in the past, as many of the audio exercises are based on repetition and substitution, which seem to mesh well with the particulars of my brain. (The only thing that has ever got me to consider joining the military is the prospect of having access to the language school at Monterey. After, that is, I was rejected by the CIA, which I applied to for similar reasons.)

I realized fairly quickly that the problem with Hungarian for me is not going to be so much that the grammar is difficult to grasp on a theoretical level, but rather that the morphology is highly whack on account of Hungarian vowel harmony (which means, broadly, that affixes change depending on the type of vowels in the stem). That is: it's a bitch in practice. Lots of little quirky changes in endings, that sort of thing. So instead of starting out by learning the grammatical patterns or paradigms, which is my usual MO, I decided to just dive in and start memorizing words and phrases.

And here's where things start to be useful for people who aren't me. Just the other day, Lifehacker's featured Mac download was a flashcard program called Genius, which "organizes your information and carefully chooses questions using an intelligent 'spaced repetition' method that's based on your past performance." I'm still not exactly sure what this means, but I will say that so far the program seems to be performing beautifully. And the best part is, the flashcard files are shareable. So if anyone else wants to learn some Hungarian with Genius, drop me an email and I'll be happy to send you the flashcard files I create.

So far, I've only entered the words and phrases from Unit One of the State Department text (which includes lots of useful things like asking if the beer is good), but I plan to keep going up until I get on the plane to Budapest.

Just don't expect me to make too much progress before the World Series is over.

fish of babel

2007-10-17T15:28:00.000-04:00

Today a friend of mine received the most astoundingly charming email from a prospective writer. It makes me love online language translators just a little bit.

How are you?

It forgives me for the confusion in the text, is that I do not say English, then I used an electronic translator pára to write it.

I was very difficult to obtain its contact. Therefore I ask for that it gives only some minutes to me of its attention.

I need an opinion of a qualified professional as you.

I finished to write my first book and would like to publish it. The fact is that Brazil is not a good market, nor so little has so qualified professionals how much in the United States to analyze a work.

Of form until innocent I believe that my book has a good tram, well I am amused and as a loving father, I would say until he does not lose in nothing for best-sellers as "The Big Needle" or "Possession". Good this in my opinion.

But my opinion does not count, I need somebody that really understands of success, and know that this person is you, therefore I am asking for its aid.

I do not know the correct form to present the work, therefore I am sending a synopsis to it of the book.

Now, for gentility, before playing this correspondence in the garbage, he considers the hypothesis to read the annex. After to read, then, you will be certain of that I do not know to write, or that I can improve, or even though who knows, exists the possibility to publish what I wrote.

I trust its opinion, moreover, I do not intimidate myself with critical, am opened to recommence everything of the zero to rewrite everything I will be myself necessary, to sacrifice me and to give everything what I have until my work of certain. However I cannot sail the blind people. Necessary of a route, and he is this that I am asked for you.

Debtor for its attention.

I wait anxious, a reply.

It's hard enough to pitch your work in your native language - I can only imagine the guts it took to plug this into a translator. Frankly, I think he deserves a shot based on chutzpah alone. If only everyone else were so willing to take a shot at getting a language so gloriously wrong.

But the real question is this: what the hell is "The Big Needle" a garbled translation of? Any ideas, Portuguese-speakers?

I wait anxious, a reply.

on the road

2007-10-16T09:42:00.000-04:00

So I was driving out to Long Island the other day (don't ask), and all of a sudden I saw this:

If you're wondering if the combination of cameraphone and moving vehicle has created an illusion, it hasn't: there is indeed a company whose phone number is 888-DRAPE-ME.

baby's first review

2007-10-15T10:55:00.000-04:00

The first review for Biting the Wax Tadpole is out!

From Publishers Weekly:

Biting the Wax Tadpole: Confessions of a Language Fanatic
Elizabeth Little. Melville (Consortium, dist.), $21.95 (180p) ISBN
978-1-933633-33-6

In her debut book, writer and editor Little searches in "linguistic nooks and crannies" for the "quirks, innovations and implausibilities of the world's languages," threading witty pop culture references through tapestries of language trivia written with the not-so-linguistic reader in mind. (The title refers to the mistranslation in Chinese of "Coca-Cola.") Little strips linguistics of its academic drudgery, showing how the Tangut language uses verbs by translating phrases like Johnny Cash's lyric "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die"; referring to pop-culture icons like Al Gore, Jabba the Hutt and the Smurfs to get the point across; and covering every language from Yoruba, a West African language, to the verbless Kelen, invented as an experiment by a Berkeley undergraduate. The book contains charming anecdotes, witty sidebars, attractive illustrations (by Ayumi Piland) and comprehensive linguistics lessons on topics ranging from the well-known ("Verbs conjugate, nouns decline") to the obscure (the disjunctive adjective: "The most infamous English example is 'hopefully,' that famed bête noir of addled prescriptionist fussbudgets"). Little's strong sense of humor never overwhelms her love of languages in this fascinating yet educational introduction to linguistics for a wide, pop-savvy audience. (Dec.)

pressing matters

2007-10-15T10:18:00.000-04:00

Last Thursday evening in my mother's hotel room, as she contemplated the outrageous expense of the items atop the mini-bar:

Mom: Would you look at this? You can buy a mini-bottle of spray starch. How odd.

Me: Odd?

Mom: Don’t most businessmen have their shirts starched and boxed before business trips?

Me, cheerfully: I have no idea - I don’t know any businessmen.

Mom, ignoring me: I guess it’s not so strange. I know at least one woman at work who always packs a bottle of starch when she travels.

Me: Well, you can’t walk into a meeting all wrinkled.

Mom: Yes, but that’s why we invented wrinkle-free fabric. Who wants to waste time ironing?

I stare at her for a long, shocked moment.

Me: I distinctly remember being scolded in high school for not knowing my way around an ironing board. And didn’t you send me off to college with a hand-held steamer?

Mom: Oh, sweetie, you never could take a joke.

lost in translation

2007-10-11T12:42:00.000-04:00

As a rabid purveyor of pop culture who has a mild fear of interpersonal interaction, online fandom is something that I find particularly compelling. Because I am, I admit, absolutely the sort of person to fall head-first into a fictional narrative, and I understand the feeling of never wanting to leave.

I should note that I was a huge Star Trek, Buffy, and X-Files fan back in the day. And with regard to the latter, thank God I started watching it before I had real Internet access, because I was (this is so embarrassing) a Troi/Riker shipper. I even purchased this book. And read it multiple times.

Had I known what fanfiction was when I started watching TNG, I can pretty much guarantee that I would’ve started writing it. And once you dip your toe into that water, it’s hard not to get swept up like Virginia Woolf on a really bad day.

I’m also interested in the more academic questions related to fandom – like why is it, for instance, that Newsies has a huge online presence? There are over 5,000 Newsies fics on fanfiction.net, more than any other movies save Star Wars, Pirates of the Caribbean, and X-Men. Which, really: what the fuck. I mean, I love Christian Bale as much as the next girl, but … singing paperboys? Really?

But whatever you might think about fanfiction as a product or a pastime, there’s little doubt that fanfiction communities are, more and more, proving to be an unexpectedly successful training ground for new writers – and, I’m realizing, language-learners.

While searching for resources on the subject of world fan culture (running the potentially terrifying Google search “fanfiction in translation” – which did indeed return a Stargate SG-1 fic), I was directed to Confessions of an Aca-Fan, the blog of Henry Jenkins, the co-founder of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. About three months ago he posted some really amazing stuff on Internet fandom and translation that was written by Ksenia Prassolova, a Russian scholar who spent a Fulbright year at MIT working on the Harry Potter fandom.

One of the most interesting parts of the piece for me (and for anyone looking to promote language study) relates to fan-driven translation projects in Russia.

She writes:

“… fandom was eagerly looking for flaws in official versions and engaging in translation projects of their own. Inspired by Maria Spivak, the 'People's Translation Project', high regard for translators in our country and the nagging 'I can do that, too' feeling, fans started to create both individual (Fleur, Yuri Machkasov) and collective (Snitch, The Phoenix Team, Harry-Hermione.net, HP Christmas Forum) translation projects, and by the time Half-blood Prince was released in Russia in December 2005, there had already been nine (sic!) independent translations on the Web, some of them completed not a week after the July 16 release of the English version.”

Read the first part here; the second can be found here.

I often recommend reading or watching a favorite book or TV show in translation when learning a language because no matter how much you love language, it can get a little dry at times. But if you’re working with something that you enjoy – or even something that you’re borderline obsessed with – you’ll be better able to get through those dry spells. And I can only imagine how painless language study might become were it able to harness the full-fledged obsession of fandom.

And if it means an even greater proliferation of Newsies slashfic, well, that's a price I'm willing to pay. As long as I don't have to read it.

construction language

2007-10-09T15:34:00.000-04:00

I recently purchased a new dresser at IKEA to replace my previous clothes-storage system, which was an elaborate arrangement of garments in descending order of cleanliness. By which I mean I had two piles on the floor next to my bed: one clean; one dirty. Honestly, this was fine by me.

But my mother is coming into town this weekend, so I felt it was time to give up la vie de bohème and buy a damn dresser - if only to avoid the otherwise inevitable “Oh, sweetie, won’t this wrinkle?” (This is also the reason I have purchased primarily wrinkle-free fabrics for the past ten years.)

Assembling the dresser - named Hemnes, after a Norwegian municipality known, I’m assuming, for its skill with faux antique finishes – is a fairly complicated process. I should point out here that I spent most of my time in college working as a stage carpenter, so my woodworking and construction skills are slightly above average. And certainly above, say, Tim the Tool Man Taylor levels of incompetence. And yet, I've made at least three fatal errors in the course of putting the damn thing together.

Although, to be fair, one of these errors only happened because I was distracted by my idiot cat. She was doing her best to eat a plastic drawer peg.

But most of my problems resulted from a misinterpretation of the directions, which, in typical IKEA fashion, are made entirely out of pictures so that the company doesn’t have to waste time or resources composing and distributing language-specific instructions. (Although: I’ve never been to an IKEA outside of the U.S. I would be incredibly amused if it turned out that every other country got instructions with actual words.)

Anyway, as I flung said instructions across the room for the third time to date, I was struck, suddenly, by a thought: how would you teach someone to write in IKEA? Because you know that there’s totally some corporate retreat where the illustrators and designers get stuck watching PowerPoint presentations about “Affordable solutions for better instruction.”

So I decided to try to decipher IKEA. As far as I can tell, there are eight components to an IKEA instruction booklet. The first is the illustration, the picture that identifies the two pieces you’re working with (and, sometimes, the tool that is needed to work with them). A big black X is applied to certain illustrations to eliminate potential ambiguities, like so:

An arrow identifies the direction of motion, while a line indicates the destination of the action (the insertion point). Speech bubbles are typically used to indicate which piece is being inserted into which. Why speech bubbles, I don’t know. Perhaps to give the illusion of amiability?

Then there are two kinds of numbers: a product number further clarifies the identity of the pieces in question while a multiplier indicates how many particular pieces are needed.

The final key component of IKEA is the facial expression of the little IKEA man.

There’s the happy face:

The sad face:

The confused face:

The I-need-to-go-to-the-gym-because-I-can’t-lift-a-piece-of-fake-wood face:

And the I’m-about-to-die face:

Nowhere, it should be noted, is the why-did-I-buy-this-crap-when-I-could-have-found-real-furniture-on-craigslist face.

Here’s my question: how would each of these parts be identified from a linguistic perspective? Here are some of my suggestions – but I’d love to know in the comments how others might interpret this. After all, I’ve never tried to make sense of a language from scratch (nor am I exactly qualified to do so), and I won’t pretend that this will be rock-solid from a linguistic standpoint. But then again, I’m analyzing an IKEA instruction manual for Pete’s sake, so I think the endeavor is, from an academic standpoint, pretty well fucked from the beginning.

Anyway! The easy stuff first: the illustrations operate as nouns; the multipliers are simple quantifiers.

The arrows and little lines, meanwhile, are the verbs. Under the circumstances, I think we can assume that the only mood in IKEA is imperative. There are, by the way, four main verbs in IKEA (or at least in the Hemnes dialect): put in, screw in, flip over, and lay down. Which leads me to believe that if IKEA were a natural language, it would be the favored language of frat boys everywhere.

The speech bubbles act as case markers: the illustration within the bubble is the object of the verb; the illustration pointed to by the speech bubble is the locative.

All potential instrumentals (i.e., that crappy little Allen wrench) are pre-case-determined on the first page of the book through the use of a similar speech bubble:

The big black X's help clarify the identity of a specific illustration, which could be considered a roundabout demonstrative. This raises the question: do any human languages (as IKEA is clearly, if not inhuman, certainly inhumane) primarily use a “not-those” instead of a “those” construction? I can’t think of one off the top of my head – the closest parallel I can think of are languages like Quechua that have inclusive and exclusive first-person plural pronouns: we-and-you and we-and-not-you.

The product numbers confuse me a bit. Both in real life and in this exercise. Because the pieces aren’t actually marked with their product numbers. The product numbers are only useful in distinguishing between similar pieces – but to do so you have to refer to the chart at the beginning of the book, which shows the product numbers as well as the rough size differences between pieces. Could this be considered a sort of size-related deixis? I’m not sure. I do know, however, that in practice the product numbers are fucking useless, as demonstrated by fatal error #2, which found me lying on my floor under the dresser with my needle-nose pliers in one hand and the biggest mallet I could find in my other. Which is never a good sign.

And then there’s Mr. IKEA Man. What function does he serve? Is he is a disjunctive adverb? An implied apodosis or a conditional mood marker? Or just someone IKEA came up with to taunt me?

Again, these are just thoughts. Because these are the sorts of things I think about. (Well, that and whether or not it is ironic or appropriate that the Indians beat the Yankees on Columbus Day.) But I’m just saying: if anyone out there with a linguistics background were to, oh, make up a mock-formal grammar tree for IKEA, I would provide them with the online equivalent of a nice wet kiss. Like a picture of a really adorable puppy or something.

Meanwhile, I'm going to see if I can't translate something from English to IKEA. Given the relative dearth of verbs, I suspect I'll be limited to translations of pop music. Or porn.

The dresser, by the way, is sitting in my bedroom half-finished, as I’m seriously wondering whether or not the drawers are absolutely necessary. I’m sure if IKEA man were to hear of this, he would look something like this:

Which, come to think of it, rather resembles the expression my mother will probably have come Friday.

wheeze-it

2007-10-08T18:22:00.000-04:00

Here's an interesting blog post from Jennifer 8. Lee at the NYT City Room blog. (Aside: I had no idea that the Times had so many blogs. I notice that Judith Warner's blog is only updated once a week. Does that even count as a blog? Isn't that just a web-only column? I'm going to stop asking questions now before I start seriously contemplating the semantics of blogging and slip into a meta-coma.)

The post/web-only article hints at the difficulties of practicing medicine and treating patients in a city whose residents speak dozens of different languages - in this particular case, the problems faced by doctors trying to diagnose asthma in Spanish-speaking patients. She writes: "In interviews with 39 Spanish speakers, 'wheeze' was translated into 12 different Spanish expressions, including 'tight chest,' 'suffocation,' 'asphyxiation,' 'snoring' and 'congested breathing.'" And, as "wheeze" is obviously a rather key term for respiratory diagnosis, a Columbia University Medical Center survey has targeted translation as a major issue in treating the rise in respiratory ailments among the city's Latino population.

Now, it's obvious that it is not the case, as I suspect Ms. Lee well knows, that there is no word in Spanish for "wheeze." But most reporters seem to find the "no word in [pick a language] for [pick a concept that somehow demonstrates the strangeness of said language or culture]" template irresistible - probably because hyperbole makes for a sweet lede. But clearly, Spanish-speakers have been wheezing just as long as English-speakers, and somewhere along the line they've undoubtedly come up with a word or phrase to describe the phenomenon. And the discussion in the comments section certainly bears this out. (As you might expect, the nasty implication that any misdiagnoses are the patients' faults for failing to learn English also rears its ugly little head. Which is so lacking in compassion and basic human decency that I won't even dignify it with a response.)

The problem, as far as I can see, seems not to be that there isn't one word in Spanish for "wheeze," but rather that there are lots of them, and that many medical professionals are not, as it turns out, equipped to deal with the lexical variation - which is no mere fodder for linguistic cocktail-party convo, but rather a serious and pressing public-health issue. And this is why I'm more than happy to forgive Ms. Lee any language-related lily-gilding. Because she certainly manages to make that latter point clear.

By the way, Language Log has a number of posts relating to the "No word for X" syndrome (or snowclone, as regular readers of that site know) that are well worth reading. My favorite is Geoffrey Pullum's "No word for 'lazy hack parroting drivel'?," but you can find a list of a number of others here.

reason #1,033 why you should be watching friday night lights

2007-10-08T15:17:00.000-04:00

Did anyone else notice that during last week’s Friday Night Lights NBC ran a onscreen banner that read “Get your own Tim Riggins” (and then, in much smaller print below that, “… jersey at NBC.com”)?

Seems like someone over in marketing finally realized what they’re doing.

everybody clap your hands

2007-10-08T10:55:00.000-04:00

I live about fifteen minutes by subway from Shea Stadium, so even though I’m a lifelong Cardinals fan, I go there from time to time to get my in-person baseball fix. Now, Shea Stadium has few aesthetic charms. It’s ugly, it’s falling down, and it reeks of urine and twenty-one years of despair. Even so, it’s become one of my favorite places to watch a game. Because nowhere else can you find The Jose Reyes Spanish Academy, a series of stadium videos in which Mets shortstop Jose Reyes teaches fans basic – and often bizarre - Spanish phrases.

Like this one:

Strangely, Reyes has never related any actual baseball phrases while I’ve been in attendance. Which got me to thinking about foreign-language sports terminology. So, in honor of the postseason, I went and did a little Internetting in search of a few resources for baseball-loving linguaphiles who might want to follow the playoffs on ESPN Deportes.

The first thing to note is that there are two Spanish words for baseball itself: la pelota and el béisbol. Anyone who’s ever studied Spanish knows that there are massive lexical variations from one region to another – something that’s particularly problematic if you, like me, have a penchant for profanity. I haven’t quite been able to pin down the locations where pelota is used instead of béisbol – my initial instinct was that one would be used in Europe and the other in Latin America, but that doesn’t seem to be true.

In fact, both seem to be in use in Puerto Rico. This site notes that “in Ponce, broadcasters never refer to the baseball; the thing the pitcher throws is la Wilson (because she is la pelota - but in Caguas, they call it el Wilson because he is el béisbol).”

Another tidbit from the same page is this: “An interesting point is the use of the adaptable suffix -azo (‘wicked big’), which is too slangy to be taught in high-school Spanish.”

I can’t help but wonder: are there Red Sox fans in Puerto Rico?

In any case, if anyone knows the rhyme and reason behind la pelota and el béisbol, I would love to hear it.

The best resource for baseball Spanish is the great bilingual baseball dictionary available for download at Baseball-Reference.com. The dictionary includes a full list of all the baseball terminology you would ever have to know in the course of a regular game. It also includes useful phrases like dedos de mantequilla – literally, “fingers of butter.” This phrase has also, apparently, been turned into verb – enmantequillarse - meaning “to bobble.” Or, as I like to think of it, “to be-butter oneself.”

Another evocative definition can be found in the entry for “fluke”: gloria de mañana, or “morning glory.” In other words, something that blooms brightly in the morning and dies in the afternoon. And the translation for the Texas Rangers is Rancheros or Vigilantes – something that made me smirk pretty nastily until I remembered that in Spanish, vigilantes just means “watchmen.” I choose, however, to think that there’s a double meaning there.

My favorite entry by far, however, is this one:

biased umpire: n.f. estatua de la libertad

I don’t feel that any additional explanation is needed there. Unless, of course, it were to come courtesy of Professor Reyes.

It’s not like he has anything better to do at the moment, after all.

Later: Japanese baseball terms and how they shed light on the sudden star power of Kaz Matsui. Because I sure as hell can’t find anything else that explains it.