Wayno’s Bizarro for 11/8 — yes, I am hopelessly overwhelmed with posting material, wondering whether I’ll ever catch up; on the other hand, my health has taken a turn back to normal awful, which I’m entirely able to cope with — is a Psychiatrist strip in which the patient is said to be suffering from (in fact, cowering behind the therapeutic couch in the grips of) the fear of contractions:
Of the types of traditionally-labeled “contractions” in English, the patient here — call him NoA — seems to exhibit sensitivity specifically to just one, now known in the linguistic literature as Auxiliary Reduction, AuxRed for short (in I am > I’m, I had > I’d, and you are > you’re), though in fact Wayno sees NoA’s sensitivity as triggered by all occurrences of the punctuation mark the apostrophe, of which there are a great many types — hence Wayno’s title for this cartoon, “Punctuation Trepidation” (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 7 in this strip — see this Page)
Now if this is NoA’s affliction, he’s in for a world of trouble, because in modern English spelling the apostrophe is used as an abstract mark for possessive forms of nominals — singular in someone’s cat and the queen of England’s hat, plural in the boys’ bat — a visual mark accompanying the possessive S; but while the the letter S in such forms corresponds to phonological content, the apostrophe neither represents phonological content nor indicates a place where some phonological content is omitted. So, how does NoA know that /sʌm.wǝnz.kæt/ in some sense has an apostrophe in it and he should cringe in fear at it?
Because, the cartoon assumes, in understanding this expression, NoA is constructing its spelling, and the spelling has an apostrophe in it, in SOMEONE’S. In this conceptualization of speech perception, spelling plays a basic role. As a mischievous slogan: Schrift über alles — in particular, Schrift über Sprechen.
And in the converse process of speech production: the assumption is that Speaking Is Reading (SIR), turning spelling into speech. The assumption of SIR is in fact the central one here; if speaking is reading, then understanding speech is recovering the spelling (so of course you’ll know when there’s an apostrophe in the spelling).
I’ll get back to the cartoon in #1, “contractions”, and apostrophes in a little while, but now a few words on the bizarre world of SIR, which is one of the truly baleful side effects of widespread literacy (in English and other languages). Literacy is in general a great gift, but of course all gifts come with genuine costs; oral cultures emphasize a different range of abilities and practices from literate cultures, and you can legitimately mourn their devaluing and loss, and you can also find the inevitable consequence of standardization that comes along with widespread literacy to be a mixed blessing. But SIR is just irrational. Nevertheless, it has a powerful grip on many literate people.
The vise of SIR. An example, and then some mockery.
From my 5/14/18 posting “Air spelling”, about:
a crucial piece of (widely held) belief about language: that when we speak, we are realizing written language acoustically — reading off pages in our heads, as it were. The idea is breath-takingly wrong, but lots of people take it to be a fundamental fact about the way the world works.
An anecdote from my colleague Chuck Fillmore, many years ago, struggling with a student who was having terrible trouble with the phonetics section of an intro linguistics course at Ohio State (which was required for English Education majors). The point at issue was the point of articulation of the fricative [š] (IPA [ʃ]) (as in ship and mush), as contrasted with [s] (as in sip and muss). (To get way ahead of the story, the answer is: palato-alveolar, or simplifying things, palatal.)
“Say [š] and then right after it, [s]”, Chuck said, “and tell me what your tongue is doing when it goes from the first to the second”. (The answer: it’s moving forward along the roof of the mouth.)
The student tried this several times, and then the lightbulb came on. “It’s dropping the H!”
[š] is SH and [s] is S (well, in city, [s] is soft C, and a fair number of students are prepared to explain to you that the consonant at the beginning of sit is different from the one at the beginning of city) — so going from the first to the second is going from SH to S.
Fillmorean facepalm.
Mockery from Monty Python. From the Travel Agent sketch (starring Bounder of Adventure — that is Mr. Bounder of the Adventure travel agency):
Bounder: Anyway, you’re interested in one of our adventure holidays, eh?
Tourist: Yes. I saw your advert in the bolour supplement.
Bounder: The what?
Tourist: The bolour supplement.
Bounder: The colour supplement?
Tourist: Yes. I’m sorry I can’t say the letter ‘B’.
Bounder: ‘C’?
Tourist: Yes, that’s right. It’s all due to a trauma I suffered when I was a spoolboy. I was attacked by a bat.
Bounder: A cat?
Tourist: No a bat.
Bounder: Can you say the letter ‘K’?
Tourist: Oh yes. Khaki, king, kettle, Kuwait, Keble Bollege Oxford.
Bounder: Why don’t you use the letter ‘K’ instead of the letter ‘C’?
Tourist: What you mean … spell bolour with a ‘K’?
Bounder: Yes.
Tourist: Kolour. Oh, that’s very good, I never thought of that.
Oh, so much more: Bibero for Cicero (with /s), bhemise for chemise (with /š/). For which Bounder would no doubt suggest spelling the words with an S instead of C: Sisero, shemise. I have no idea what Bounder’s remedy would be in the cases of bhop for chop and biao for ciao (which have /č/); maybe he’s doomed to B here.
Yes, it’s preposterous; it’s supposed to be preposterous.
As is NoA’s apostrophobia in #1. So let’s get back to him.
Diagnosing NoA’s affliction. The cartoon doesn’t actually specify what the therapist said that sent NoA into a flop sweat of fear. Some word with a “contraction” (a school-grammar term for various omissions of phonological material), since she refers to his fear of contractions — not necessarily an AuxRed contraction, but all three examples she gives are of AuxRed-able phrases (I am, I had, you are), not any other types of contraction, notably the contracted negative n’t in don’t (for do not), hasn’t (for has not), etc., the contracted exhortation let’s for let us, and contracted decade names like the ’80s for the 1980s, plus an assortment of other omissions, some of them poetic — ‘twixt for betwixt, e’er for ever; some conventionally frozen in time, like o’clock for of the clock and e’en for even ‘eve’ in the older spelling Hallowe’en; some belonging to regional dialects, like southern US y’all for you-all and Australian g’day for good day; some marking omissions in casual speech, like especially the “g-dropping” (final /n/ for /ŋ/) in playin’ for playing etc.
(Things change. When I was in grade school, I was chastised for failing to use the apostrophe in Hallowe’en — I objected that it was pointless, but was told sternly that that was just the way things were — but now most Americans view the Hallowe’en spelling as an anachronism and many copyeditors routinely delete the apostrophe if you use it.)
In any case, the contractions the therapist talks about are all AuxRed, so let’s assume that it was an AuxRed example that triggered NoA’s anxiety attack. There’s a Page on this blog about my writings on Auxiliary Reduction in English, starting with “Auxiliary Reduction in English” (Linguistic Inquiry, 1970) — viewable in a pdf here — which set the tone for a huge body of research that has continued for 55 years.
However, the title of the cartoon tells us that NoA’s horror at AuxRed is but one manifestation of a larger phobic syndrome, whose source in NoA’s life history we know nothing about, beyond the fact that apostrophes were involved. We know that the aversion has generalized over Aux Red and to the other sorts of contractions (broadly conceived), all of which are signaled in spelling by an apostrophe at the site of the omitted material. And it will have generalized to still other, non-contraction, uses of the apostrophe — in particular to apostrophes as marks of various sorts of possessives, and presumably also to uses of the apostrophe as a mark of plurals in some special cases (and in an array of non-standard usages, but I’ll stick to the standard stuff here).
This sort of generalization of psychological damage syndromes — in post-traumatic stress responses, aversive panics, and crippling phobias — is commonplace (I suffer from a couple of these generalized syndromes myself; one of them, still operative 65 years after the triggering event, makes me nearly unable to speak in any situation resembling an oral examination).
But on with the apostrophes.
Companion to S: apostrophes in possessives and plurals. Now we’re in the area where, with the exception of some special cases, apostrophes neither represent phonological content nor indicate a place where some phonological content is omitted:
in possessives:
— in prenominal possessives: the ‘S possessive in A CAT’S FUR (sg), the S’ possessive in THOSE CATS’ (pl)
and in a variety of other possessive constructions, among them:
— predicative: THIS FUR IS YOUR CAT’S (sg) / CATS’ (pl)
— location: LET’S MEET AT YOUR FRIEND’S (sg) / FRIENDS’ (pl) [place]
— time-span: A MOMENT’S REFLECTION (sg), TWO HOURS’ LABOR (pl)
— phrase-final non-head ‘S: SOME CAT (sg) / CATS (pl) FROM MEXICO’S FUR
(with an assortment of peculiarities that I’ll just allude to without further comment, among them the apostrophe-less possessive personal pronoun ITS in THE CAT LICKED ITS FUR; and a choice between ‘S and just the apostrophe for the possessive of proper names spelled with final S: either JACQUES’S MEMORY or JACQUES’ MEMORY, depending on which authority you read)
in plurals: the general principle is that the ‘S is never used to express plural number in standard spelling: COCKLE’S AND MUSSEL’S, ALIVE ALIVE, OH illustrates the much-maligned “greengrocer’s apostrophe”, extraordinarily common in two senses of common, ‘frequent’ and ‘unrefined, vulgar’. But plurals of numerals look ugly enough that some style sheets allow 1’s and 2’s rather than 1s and 2s, and some American style sheets recommend an apostrophe in time-span plurals, like the 1970’s (versus the 1970s).
There does seem to be unanimity is calling for an apostrophe in plurals following lower-case letter-names: p’s and q’s, not ps and qs; the letter had several ps’s; the first page of the score has three ff’s.
Now we are way out in the wild weeds of usage, and some of you are wondering about esoterica like Ps and Qs vs. P’s and Q’s and two DOJs vs. two DOJ’s. Try not to dwell on these things. Do what thou wilt; some will applaud thee, some revile thee. Life will go on.
Getting a grip. Let’s get back to NoA, who isn’t looking at writing or printing, but listening to his therapist talk. The stylistic esoterica involving alternative usages now present a genuine puzzle in understanding NoA’s affliction. Up above I wrote:
if speaking is reading, then understanding speech is recovering the spelling (so of course you’ll know when there’s an apostrophe in the spelling)
But if there are alternative spellings, some with an apostrophe and some without, how is an apostrophobic like NoA to know what his therapist had in mind when she says, oh, /tu.di.o.ǰez/ — two DOJs (no apostrophe, no panic) or two DOJ’s (apostrophe and panic)? Not only does NoA have to reconstruct the spelling, he has to read his therapist’s mind to do so.
And so, as the sun sets in the west, we bid a sad farewell to Speaking Is Reading and abandon the idea of apostrophobia as a phenomenon of speech perception. There might possibly be people who are panicked by the sight of an apostrophe (assuming they’ve learned how to distinguish apostrophes from single quotes); that would be a nightmare affliction for a literate person in our culture, immersed as we are in written and printed text.
November 17, 2024 at 10:39 am |
Delicious but irrelevant digression. At the end of the bit from the Travel Agency sketch, the tourist says, not only:
but adds, in some performances:
In BrE slang, cunt is a term of abuse, most often used by men to other men.