Two items: first, a recent flap about sports reporting using the expression Chink in the armor in stories about Chinese-American (well, Taiwanese-American) basketball phenom Jeremy Lin; and second, e-mail to me objecting to my characterizing Chink as an epithet specifically for the Chinese (with my correspondent maintaining that it applied to all people of East Asian descent — because of their slit eyes).
Archive for the ‘Language in the media’ Category
The Chink files
February 20, 2012Reportage
January 25, 2012Steve Kleinedler (of the American Heritage Dictionary) has pointed me to a story in the Chicago Tribune today in which he’s interviewed by reporter Heidi Stevens about on-line mistakes and peeves about them:
Nitpicking grammar in the digital age
With more and more communication happening digitally, is it time to stop the grammar gripes?
Steve’s first appearance:
“It’s almost impossible to speak for 30 minutes and not make a speech error,” says Steve Kleinedler, executive editor of the American Heritage Dictionary. “As someone who has had his grammar picked apart based on radio interviews, it’s sort of scary.”
(Kleinedler once had the audacity to say, during an NPR interview about the American Heritage Usage Panel, “Every year, we send out the panel a ballot full of questions asking their opinions.” This earned the scorn of one Arnold Zwicky, blogger, who took issue with “send” being followed by “out.” Apparently this is a dative alternation. Or something.)
“No one can stand up to that scrutiny,” Kleinedler contends. We agree.
Wow. I’m the bad guy, the nasty nitpicking blogger.
Strong language
January 14, 2012On NPR’s Morning Edition yesterday, a StoryCorps segment by Nathan Hoskins, on growing up in rural Kentucky and knowing from an early age that he was gay — preceded by the warning:
Listeners should know that there is strong language in this conversation.
The strong language in question is one occurrence of the word faggot, in a shocking story: his mother intercepted an affectionate note to him from another boy, took him (and a shotgun) out in the car into the country, stood him up against a tree and told him she’d blow his head off “if he ever decided to be a faggot” — so he got good at concealing the truth. (Even after he came out to her, years later, she never admitted she was wrong; apparently, she believed she’d done the right thing.)
The shotgun story is, as I said, shocking, and the word faggot seems to me to be a crucial element in it.
At least they didn’t bleep it.
The season of penis and vagina
October 30, 2011Trend watchers have been remarking on the frank vocabulary of this season’s television shows. For instance, June Thomas on Slate on September 19th noted “a sudden affection for using anatomical terms for lady parts and manly bits”, and Bill Carter in the New York Times on September 21st maintained that “this year’s hot TV trend is anatomically correct”. And now on the New York Magazine site there’s a video displaying “all the ‘penis’ and ‘vagina’ shout-outs on fall TV”.
“phonetic sounds”
October 17, 2011Perri Klass in the NYT Science Times on October 11th, on “Hearing Bilingual: How Babies Sort Out Language”, reports on research on bilingual babies by Patricia Kuhl (University of Washington), Janet Werker (University of British Columbia), and Ellen Bialystok (York University in Toronto), focusing on Kuhl’s work. The background for the current research is this well-known finding about the development of “phonemic hearing” in monolinguals:
… the researchers found that at 6 months, the monolingual infants could discriminate between phonetic sounds, whether they were uttered in the language they were used to hearing or in another language not spoken in their homes. By 10 to 12 months, however, monolingual babies were no longer detecting sounds in the second language, only in the language they usually heard.
Here, Klass is struggling to talk about an important technical concept — phonemic distinctness — but without using the technical terminology or explaining the concept in a way the reader can understand correctly.
Bromantic lexicography
August 26, 2011A little note on lexicography in the media. As each new edition of a well-known dictionary comes out, there’s a little media blitz; it’s always news that new words are welcomed to “the dictionary” (or that some are retired). So for Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, now covered in many places. Here’s the beginning of the Reuters story:
US Merriam-Webster dictionary adds “tweet,” “bromance”
By Molly O’Toole
Aug 25 (Reuters) – Crowdsourcing tweeters bonding in bromance and tracking cougars earned an official place in the English lexicon on Thursday when Merriam-Webster announced the addition of 150 words to its 2011 Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. (link)
(this following on the bromantic cartoon I posted recently).
The article is clear that dictionaries record established usages, not admit them to to some sort of inner circle of wordhood — “Gosh, bromance is a word now; it’s in the dictionary!” — but, still, the attraction of these stories lies in the perceived authority of dictionaries to govern usage. No doubt there are people out there bewailing the degradation of the English vocabulary by the inclusion of bromance, tweet, and the other newcomers in the new Webster’s Collegiate.
Indecency?
July 8, 2011Two recent stories from ADS-L about putatively indecent language: on slut and uterus.
A shortened version of Richard
July 1, 2011In the Washington Post blogs yesterday, three devious ways of reporting the slur dick (boldfaced below):
Mark Halperin suspended from MSNBC after calling Obama a vulgar name on ‘Morning Joe’ (Video)
By Sarah Anne HughesMark Halperin, a political analyst on MSNBC, called President Obama a word that starts with “D” and is synonymous with a part of the male anatomy Thursday on “Morning Joe.” [Try to disregard the somewhat confused notion of synonymy here.]
MSNBC issued a statement suspending Halperin at 10:30 a.m.
“Mark Halperin’s comments this morning were completely inappropriate and unacceptable. We apologize to the President, The White House and all of our viewers. We strive for a high level of discourse and comments like these have no place on our air. Therefore, Mark will be suspended indefinitely from his role as an analyst.”
The incident took place after host Joe Scarborough asked Halperin what he thought Obama’s strategy was at a press conference held Wednesday, Halperin asked, “Are we on the seven second delay?”
After getting the go ahead from Scarborough that the show had the safety precaution of filming seven seconds before it went live — enough time to bleep out any bad words — Halperin said, “I thought he was a [shortened version of Richard] yesterday.”
Untabooing, maintaining the taboo
April 29, 2011I was struck recently about the delicate lines drawn around some taboo vocabulary in the media, in particular on television shows. On the series Charmed (on the WB network from 1998-2006, now endlessly in re-runs on TNT), displaced, non-literal uses of various words are fine:
Fired for something
January 6, 2011From Yahoo! Sports blogs on January 4 (hat tip from Chris Vinyl):
ESPN fires announcer for calling female colleague ‘sweet baby’
By Chris Chase