Category Archives: Pop Culture

The grey squirrel of grammar

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Here’s a companion piece to the Eliza Doolittle post I wrote yesterday.

“The grey squirrel of grammar” is the pairing of “there is” with a plural subject, e.g. “there’s five plates on the table.” Like the North American squirrels that now make Britain home, it’s here to stay, says Michael McCarthy, writing in The Guardian. But he’s okay with that. He sees it as an example of acceptable bad grammar — it’s not worth getting fussed about since we all understand what is being said.

He’s a bit tougher, however, when it comes to written language or constructions where bungled grammar interferes with clarity . . .

It’s not the building, it’s the job

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A study of 4000 public employees in the UK found that the symptoms usually ascribed to “sick building syndrome” are actually more strongly correlated to “job stress and lack of support in the workplace” than to physically measurable triggers (i.e. “poor air circulation and unacceptably high levels of CO2, noise, fungus and airborne chemicals”).

On the other hand, if you work in a place that makes you feel awful, it doesn’t much matter why you feel that way, or what the cause is . . .

“The Eliza Doolittles of the early 21st century”

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From the always-interesting New York Observer, Jason Horowitz has written an article about “the Affect.”

From the San Fernando Valley, where some think the accent has its origins in the infamous Valley Girl, to the soap stores of Soho, young women are communicating differently. But unlike their Cockney counterpart, they don’t peddle wilted flowers in the London markets. They have college diplomas from Georgetown and Penn, and respectable addresses in Kips Bay and wherever else laundry machines in doorman buildings spin Theory pants and Michael Stars shirts in a black and pastel blur. They sell advertising space and plan events in New York City. They practice law (uhhhhm, ob-juhk-tion?), trade stocks (baiiiigh? seh-uhhhl?), and eat at swanky restaurants (sew guuuuuhhhd.) This Affect, however, is not inherited from parents, though it’s an effective tool for extracting money and presents from them. It’s not even picked up in the playground — except in its more posh precincts. It’s caught from other proudly upper-middle-class girls who love nothing more than to linger on a vowel.

The article includes some observations by John V. Singler, a sociolinguistics professor at New York University, who listened to recordings of the Affect.

There was more pitch range than usual. Usually the extremes of pitch change for emphasis, and this wasn’t the case. In terms of the amount of pitch variation, in ordinary sentences and not in places of emphasis. I hadn’t noticed that before.

Other signature characteristics of the Affect are glottal stops in place of “t’s” and that “high, rising intonation contour, more commonly referred to as “uptalk” — the seemingly contagious practice of lifting the end of every phrase to create the effect of a question.”

On the one hand, Horowitz notes, professional women are paying voice coaches to help them unlearn this accent. (I guess it’s an accent? lol)

On the other hand, it may represent the latest in the ongoing drift of spoken English, or, as Horowitz slyly notes, “The time may not be far off when mothers will be reprimanding their children for not inserting a ‘like’ before an adjective.”

New domain: Masters in Seinfeld?

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Here’s another book review. The subject, this time, is Seinfeld, Master of Its Domain: Revisiting Television’s Greatest Sitcom, edited by David Lavery and Sara Lewis Dunne of Middle Tennessee State University.

The review appears in the National Post, and was written by Robert Fulford.

Here’s an excerpt of the column to set the tone:

But this latest book notably differs in tone from standard university products. Appreciation and enjoyment, combined with wonder at the cleverness of the program’s writers, set the tone. The platoon of scholars writing the essays understand Seinfeld as brilliant popular art, not merely a specimen demanding intellectual dissection. This means we can admire their insights without giving up our love for the best television farce we’ll ever see.

Enjoy ;-)

Hyperthymestic syndrome

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There’s only one person known to have it.

Her symptoms? A preternatural memory.

Give her any date, and she can

recall the day of the week, usually what the weather was like on that day, personal details of her life at that time, and major news events that occurred . . .

[She] remembers trivial details as clearly as major events. Asked what happened on Aug 16, 1977, she knew that Elvis Presley had died, but she also knew that a California tax initiative passed on June 6 of the following year, and a plane crashed in Chicago on May 25 of the next year, and so forth. Some may have had a personal meaning for her, but some did not.

She’s not an idiot savant. She’s a “fully functioning person.”

Now–isn’t this typical!–she’s been kidnapped by scientists and is being held in a lab where they’re preparing to run a series of MRIs . . . ha ha ha, just kidding about the kidnapping part. She’s volunteered to be studied. We guess.

(I wonder if her mother ate a lot of eggs.)

Hyperthymestic syndrome

Call it functional post-feminist fashion

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At Paper Napkin, Sheryl asks women to list the contents of their purses.

My list is a bit skimpy. I’m not a purse person.

It’s the carrying part. I want to be hands-free. I want to swing my arms freely when I walk. I want to be ready to grab at money flying through the air, with both hands, should the back of an armored truck burst open while driving by, and without having to worry about dropping my purse.

Until recently, I’d gone purseless for years. Five or six. I’d carry my flat stuff in my back pocket, set of keys and little pen knife (good thing I’m not a student) in my front pocket and sometimes a few other bits — Kleenex, biz cards.

Then along came the cell phone, something else I’d been doing without. It’s one thing to carry car keys in your pocket but a cell phone? Straying toward un-feminine bulging, can’t have that.

So I poked around the Internet and praise capitalism, found the Hobo International Dora Cell Phone Holder, which I bought (in Sienna), and which arrived two days later, and it’s perfect. It’s got the long strap so I can cross it from one shoulder to the opposite hip (hands-free! hands-free! and no loose-bra-strap feeling from having a purse strap constantly slipping from my shoulder!), it’s small, and it’s gorgeous.

purse

(I looked at this, too, and might pick one up in red someday :-) )

Food and conscience

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I buy and eat organic almost exclusively, and have been for about 20 years now. I will do without, in other areas, in order to be able to afford it.

I considered getting into organic growing back in the 80s, when organic was just catching on.

My new novel’s protagonist has chucked everything to start over as an organic farmer.

So yeah, I support the organic food paradigm. But it doesn’t surprise me that as a social experiment, it’s gotten a little shady around the edges.

In Slate, the aptly named Field Maloney looks at how Whole Foods plays loose with its “why organic” in-store spin and writes

When the Department of Agriculture established the guidelines for organic food in 1990, it blew a huge opportunity. The USDA—under heavy agribusiness lobbying—adopted an abstract set of restrictions for organic agriculture and left “local” out of the formula. What passes for organic farming today has strayed far from what the shaggy utopians who got the movement going back in the ’60s and ’70s had in mind.

Well I was sitting in the living rooms of those shaggy utopians. Their biggest worry: if they didn’t bring in the feds, agribusiness would hijack the “organic” moniker and corrupt it.

They gambled that federal control would protect their business model, and ceded control.

C’est la vie.

It’s naive to think that attempts to script virtuous outcomes won’t, from time to time, lead to less-than-virtuous results. (For another example, look at the questions raised about Fair Trade coffee in this Reason article).

Yet Maloney’s observations are weak for being overly narrow. In Rochester, for instance, people are banding together in cooperatives for the sole reason of giving direct patronage to local organic growers (email me, btw, if you’re from around here and want to know more). Unless we’re an anomaly, which I doubt, that’s happening all over.

Furthermore, as much fun as it is to decry that “five or six big California farms dominate the whole industry,” that’s still a lot of acreage that isn’t getting pesticides dumped on it regularly.

Not to mention the fact that the organics mindset has dragged even conventional farming partway to the dance, ushering in more responsible use of pesticide (e.g. integrated pest management, where you spray only when you actually observe pest damage, instead of prophylacticly).

Bottom line: we’re still better off with organic growing that without it.