Month: December 2018

2018 Words of the Year

Low Brow Posts

It’s December and December means end of year lists. Here are some of the words that caught our eye with their ascendance in 2018 and their creative fulfillment of some essential communicative voids.

By the way, 1) this list is alphabetical because we love all our lexical babies equally, 2) we don’t get our panties in a bunch over what a word is, so the list includes phrases that operate as semantic units, and 3) this list is heavy on the internet lingo and usage because we are millenials who don’t have IRL conversations with anyone ever.

  • big mood

noun phrase: something relatable

This one has been percolating for a bit. It showed up on Urban Dictionary on September 14, 2017, but it’s presence has continued to grow this past year. Says who? Says The Daily Dot, an internet publication that covers internet news. The Daily Dot credits “big mood” and its less intense cousin, “a mood” to Black Twitter and argues it’s a replacement for TFW (that feeling when) which peaked in Spring 2017. On social media a mood and big mood frequently accompany a reaction GIF or image, but it can also be a response to something relatable.

  • the brands

noun phrase: multinational corporations, especially their PR and social media arms

The concept of brand has been around since 2700 BCE when the ancient Egyptians started branding livestock to differentiate their cattle from a neighbors. Then the merchants were like, “good idea,” and started using symbols and names to brand their swag. The ubiquity and importance of brand in business has led to the word’s usage for individuals:  “my personal brand” and such and such behavior is “on brand.”

Over this past couple years we noticed the word being used in a slightly new way online. The brands refers to an amorphous group of multinational corporations. It’s usually derisive and often used to poke fun of corporations when they are performing wokeness or trying to be playful online.

  • canceled

participle adjective: to reject or dismiss something or someone

The top definition of canceled on Urban Dictionary was submitted on March 10, 2018 and reflects an emerging usage among the extremely online types: such and such person or thing is canceled on account of sucking. Canceled frequently collocates with a time reference and, for some inexplicable reason, men. JK… it is extremely explicable.

  • thank u, next

verb phrase: expressing gratitude and readiness to move on

“thank u, next” is the “boy, bye” of 2018. Ariana Grande publicly addressed her high profile break ups when she released the track “thank u, next” telling her exes later gators, but also thnx. It’s polite and dismissive, a compliment and a sick burn. We all need this semantic unit in our lives.  

If you do a search for “thank u, next” on Twitter, your results will be clogged with references to the record-breaking song. But stick with it and you’ll find people starting to use it to punctuate their posts ranging from defenses of the cast of CW’s Riverdale to feminist statements. It seems to be mostly applied as a performative utterance to indicate the speaker has finished saying what they need to say and are dismissing their interlocutor.

  • Weird flex but OK

noun phrase: “I am not sure why you are bragging about that. However, it’s fine.”

Okay, this one– and, let’s be real, the whole list– is pretty memey (memish? memical?), but Oxford Dictionaries shortlisted Big Dick Energy for their WOTY, so we are going to do what we want with this list.

This phrase is a rejoinder to someone bragging or showing off about something they really shouldn’t be. Flex has been used in African American English to mean bragging, boasting, showing off, etc. for a long time, but Weird flex but OK emerged more recently. Since October 2018 there have been 7 entries in Urban Dictionary defining it in similar ways and one even bemoans it’s overuse and subsequent lack of meaning. The phrase made it on Buzzfeed’s top memes of 2018 and has been covered by multiple ‘splainers like this and this and this. It’s pretty fresh, so we shall see if it has staying power.

Please voice your questions and disagreements in the comments. Also, keep an eye out for words with fresh faces in 2019!

Read More
By Kaylin Wainwright No Comments
Share:

Expat v. Immigrant v. Migrant Post 3: Collocating Adjectives in Corpus

Low Brow Posts

The public discourse around people who move to the U.S. is ugly at the moment (the moment being Build a Wall, Travel Ban, and Zero Tolerance). This series uses dictionaries and corpus linguistics to reflect on how we speak about people that move from one country to another.

We looked at dictionary definitions. We looked at dictionary example sentences. Now we go straight to the horse’s mouth: corpus. We are going to check out which words collocate with immigrant, migrant, and expat in that sexy stallion, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA).

COCA is “the largest freely-available corpus of English, and the only large and balanced corpus of American English.” They had me at free. It’s a big ol’ database with spoken, academic, fiction, newspaper, and magazine texts from American English sources and you can query to your heart’s content.

Confession Time: It’s been a hot minute since my graduate class on language analysis and I honestly forgot near everything I once learned about using corpora, so forgive me and make suggestions if something doesn’t seem right in the search methodology described below.

So what are we looking at here in this table? For each of the People that Move lexical items you can see the top five adjective collocations that go before them. Meaning when I searched for migrant- as a lemma so it encompassed singular and plural forms- COCA pranced through her database of texts and identified that Mexican was the word that most frequently preceded it, black was second most frequent, etc.

Expats are most likely to be qualified with their nationalities, and the top nationalities are Western countries with white majorities. Immigrants are frequently described by their legal status, but also as Mexican. Migrants have a mix of nationality, race, and status. Why don’t we have Mexican expats when Mexican people comprise the largest portion of foreign born living in the U.S.? Why must we speak of immigrants primarily in terms of legal status?

Read More
By Kaylin Wainwright No Comments
Share:

Paper Drags: Do Linguistic Structures Affect Human Capital?

Low Brow Posts

In case you’ve been off linguistics Twitter for the last week, you should know that it coniptioned last Wednesday. This is what happened.

A study was dropped (ya, academics drop papers) that claimed that in countries where the dominant language allowed pronouns to be omitted, education suffered.

There were a lot of hot takes with linguists sashaying into Twitter for an opportunity to drag this quote unquote study.

TL;DR: the study ignores current work in the field, doesn’t collaborate, uses sloppy methods, and arrives at biased results.

Here are the problems with it as mined from Twitter:

Research:

This study by Horst Feldmann (2018) is not based on current research in linguistics. The “recent” research in that is referenced in the introduction is a baloney economics study from 2013 by M. Keith Chen. It was dragged in its own time for its interpretation of the now infamous Theory of Linguistic Relativity.

Theory of Linguistic Relativity: This a nearly century old study that claimed that an individual’s thoughts are restrained by the languages they speak. It is also known as Whorfianism.

A heck-ton of studies over the last 100 years have attempted to prove or disprove this theory. These days, linguists generally accept that language does or might have some effect on thought, but that we’re not quite sure how large that affect is or might be. I’m not going to get into it here, but if you want to learn more, get reading!

Feldmann, like Chen before him, ran with what we call the strong version of the hypothesis. He boldly claims that “…language shapes speakers’ mental representation of reality…” which it doesn’t. If Feldmann had studied linguistics, he would have known that.

This leads us to the second major issue:

Author expertise:

@gretchenmcculloch compared this type of study to a linguist writing an economics paper. @sesquiotic pointed out that the study was not even co-authored by a linguist. He tweeted that the study has a “crib-toy use of linguistics” and that its chain of reasoning and supposition is patently problematic.

This is all a part of the invisibility of the linguistics field. @adamCSchembri pointed out that somehow, linguists aren’t considered experts by academicians in other fields.

But since Feldmann went ahead and decided to act the linguist anyway, let’s look at his premise:

The premise:

The premise of the paper is that there are languages that license the dropping of the pronoun before a verb. That’s true. A common example is Spanish whose speakers could say “yo hablo” (I speak), but can use just the “hablo” part if they want. Ok, so that’s an incredibly overly simplified explanation, but that’s for another time.

What Feldmann got wrong was claiming that English does not license the dropping of the pronoun. Actually speakers of English do it all the time. For example “do you speak English?” “Sure do!” or “Guess so.”

Yep, that’s pronoun drop. So the premise is wrong. This brings us to the bad linguistics of it all:

Bad linguistics:

@sesquiotic: the study doesn’t include actual linguistics and makes some pretty big claims about linguistics.

This paper is full of bad linguistics so here’s a list of a few that came up on Twitter:

  1. Misspelling hablo as ablo
  2. Studying 103 languages, but not mentioning which ones
  3. Mentioning spoken language, but not including any in their data
  4. Not defining or citing language variables used in regression tables
  5. Grouping together languages without acknowledging language families
  6. Using English example sentences that no one has ever uttered (I speak)
  7. Claiming that V-S-O languages are the most common, but not backing it up with evidence
  8. Referencing “ancient cultural values” and the “distant past” without defining what those things are or researching language history

@eviljoemcveigh: the linguistics is garbage so regression methods, covariates, and other statistical decisions are uninformed.

What do you get when you take an outdated hypothesis, add a false premise, and stir in some bad linguistics?

The conclusion:

Feldmann concludes that dropping a pronoun has a “negative effect of human capital” and that speakers of those languages have less education. Many people on Twitter were reminded of a similar conclusion by the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster in an open letter to the Kansas School Board.

The thing is, if you’re not putting in solid research and defined linguistic variables, the conclusion is moot. Feldmann’s conclusion is punching down at countries with less access to education and claiming that no one’s to blame because language. But there are guilty parties in the disparities in education around the world. A linguistics website isn’t the best place to learn about them, but this paper isn’t just bad linguistics, it’s bad anthropology, bad economics, and bad statistics, bad research design, and bad critical thinking.

This bish’s conclusion? Sashay away, Feldmann!

Special thanks to Joe McVeigh (@Eviljoemcveigh), Lee Murray (@MurrayLeeA), Gretchen McCulloch (@GretchenAMcC), James Harbeck (@sesquiotic), and Nic Subtirelu (@linguisticpulse).

Recommended for no bishes!

————————————————————
Feldmann, Horst. “Do Linguistic Structures Affect Human Capital? The Case of Pronoun Drop.” Kyklos: International Review for Social Sciences, 8 Nov. 2018, doi:10.1111/kykl.12190.

Chen, M. Keith (2013). The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior: Evidence from Savings Rates, Health Behaviors, and Retirement Assets, American Economic Review. 103(2): 690‐731.

Read More
By Caitlin O'Connell No Comments
Share:

Expat v. Immigrant v. Migrant Post 2: Dictionary Examples

Low Brow Posts

The public discourse around people who move to the U.S. is ugly at the moment (the moment being Build a Wall, Travel Ban, and Zero Tolerance). This series (Post 1) uses dictionaries and corpus linguistics to reflect on how we speak about people that move from one country to another.

If like my co-bish, Caitlin, you read dictionaries for fun, you might have noticed that there are frequently example phrases and sentences to provide further context of how the word is used. You might even own a book that composed short stories using only dictionary example sentences and you might read it aloud to your indifferent friend, Kaylin.

Lexicographers select example phrases and sentences from corpora that demonstrate how that word is used in a “typical grammatical and semantic context.” That is to say, the examples are intended to be emblematic of the word’s usage as determined by big data (corpus linguistics). Some online dictionaries even populate example sentences from recent media in addition to the official example. What are typical grammatical and semantic contexts for expat, immigrant, and migrant?

An example of a bad example.

We will stick with the same dictionaries from the first post in this series. American Heritage Dictionary online had no examples (can someone old school look them up for me in your real life dictionary pleeaassee). However, our other two dictionaries give us some food for thought.

Compare New Oxford American Dictionary’s examples for expat and immigrant:

  • ‘American expatriates in London’
  • ‘they found it difficult to expel illegal immigrants.’

The difference is jarring. I am jarred. Expats are from a wealthy country neutrally existing in a cosmopolitan city. Immigrants are without status and an ominous ‘they’ attempts to remove them.

(New Oxford American did not have an official example for migrant, but it had multiple example sentences from what I gather to be news sources though they are not credited. From words spelled commonwealthily and references to Australia, I have surmised that most these sources are not American, and must be coming from the sister dictionary Oxford Dictionary of English.)

Merriam-Webster doesn’t chap my lips as much.

  • ‘English and American expatriates in the bars of Paris’
  • ‘Millions of immigrants came to America from Europe in the 19th century.’  
  • ‘migrants in search of work on farms’.

The M-W example for immigrant is not negative like NOA’s, so that’s something. As in NOA, expats are from wealthy, Western countries with white majorities hanging out in a foreign city. This particular example was from a sentence about Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein credited to Robert Penn Warren. The example for migrant squares with M-W’s definition: a person who moves regularly for agricultural work. Agricultural labor, a so-called low-skilled job, is not for expats. Expats move abroad to work as writers and NGO staff and businessbishes. Expats have privilege. Migrants move abroad to toil in fields. Migrants are disenfranchised.

Not blaming Mrs. Dictionary for any of this. She is merely the vessel. Tune in for the next post on the source material: corpus.

Read More
By Kaylin Wainwright No Comments
Share: