Watching What We Say

The other day I was asked to fill out a survey for a friend’s linguistics class.

Now, I generally like taking surveys, since it involves talking about me. You don’t become a blogger unless this is one of your favorite activities, and I own this particular character flaw with an unseemly joy.

I also enjoy classes like that. For someone who is utterly hopeless at the actual mechanics of learning foreign languages, I have always found languages in general to be interesting things. I even managed to convince my undergraduate institution to count “The History of the English Language” and “American Dialects” as history classes for my major, a feat of persuasion that still gives me a sneaking sense of pride nearly a quarter of a century later.

But this survey just annoyed me.

The main question posed was whether or not the United States should pass laws establishing English as its only language and refuse from that point on to acknowledge any other language in its day to day activities. I am not sure how this would work in actual practice and the survey offered no specifics, just the general idea that other languages would somehow go away if ignored in much the same way that the national debt seems to have done lately. All that it said was that if we so legislate it, the United States would become a haven for the English language, where it could flourish uncontaminated by the foul sounds of foreign words.

We will step lightly over the fact that most of the English language – from its grammar to its vocabulary – is the product of mixing with other languages. Such reality-based ideas are not really what the English-only movement is all about and to hold it to these factual standards is therefore in some sense unfair.

The English-only movement here in the United States is one of the drearier forms of Nativism that we have lurking around the edges of American culture these days. The theory behind this movement, one supposes, is that there must have been a time way back in the rose-colored past when everyone in America spoke English as their sole language, but that somehow, through perilously unguarded immigration, moral looseness, or general carelessness, the United States has degenerated from this into a stew of other, lesser languages. “This is ‘Murrica!” the cry goes. “Speak English or get out!”

What a steaming load of nonsense this is.

Say it with me, people: The United States is not now nor has it ever been an English-only nation.

No, it wasn’t one then.

No, not then either.

No – nice try – but not even then was English the only language spoken in the United States. This has never been true, not as far back as you can go or as recent as you can slice it, and no amount of historical ignorance or pre-digested wingnut talking points can overcome the mountains of pathological stupidity required to believe otherwise.

I find it odd that the people making this case rarely do so in Algonquin, Cherokee, Navajo or Iroquois, for one thing. Apparently the English-speaking immigrants were exempt from the oft-stated demand that newcomers learn the language already spoken on the ground.

But even if you confine this all to European arrivals into what is now the United States, it’s still nonsense. The original colonists spoke a bewildering variety of languages – among them Dutch, French, Swedish, a host of African tongues, and a fair amount of German – and this did not change after independence. The nineteenth century only confirmed the polyglot nature of American society and as late as 1914 one out of every four Americans still spoke German on a daily basis. Other than specific languages rising and falling in popularity, none of that story has changed since then, either. Americans speak now and have always spoken a wide variety of languages.

It’s what happens when you have a nation settled by immigrants.

Ironically enough, in light of the fact that so much of the English-only ire is directed at Spanish speakers these days, the first Europeans to settle in what is now the United States were in fact Spanish. St. Augustine, Florida, is the oldest European-founded city in the United States, and it had been there for generations by the time the English put down their first permanent roots at Jamestown, Virginia. Florida, in fact, remained a Spanish possession until the early 1800s.

This doesn’t even begin to get into the fact that most of the American southwest – everything from California to Texas and the Rio Grande to the Oregon border – belonged to Mexico until the United States forcibly removed it from their possession in the 1840s, and was therefore populated by Spanish speakers long before Anglo-Americans showed up. One of the things that is fun to point out to my US 1 class is that the original illegal immigrants into Texas were white Americans in the 1830s, when the place was still a Mexican province called Tejas.

The fact that so much of the English-only crowd seems to hail from places that were originally settled by Spanish-speakers is probably just the universe’s way of being sarcastic.

I have no patience for the kind of aggressive ignorance and bullying stupidity that the English-only movement embodies and I see no reason why I should be polite about it.

C'Mon, Baby, Put the Rock in the House

The girls went curling today.

One of the things about living in Wisconsin is that you learn what curling is. For those of you who live in warmer climes or who somehow missed the Norwegian men’s team in this year’s Winter Olympics (and really, with pants like the ones they were wearing, how on earth could you have possibly missed them? Entire fleets of spy satellites had to be shut down to avoid being overwhelmed by the glare from those pants), curling is a winter activity that resembles nothing so much as shuffleboard on ice.

Each team sits at one end of a stretch of ice that has a large bulls-eye painted at the other end. The goal is to slide large chunks of granite down the ice to rest on the bulls-eye. And it may have been in the Olympics, but it is most definitely not a sport. It can be performed perfectly well – even, perhaps, better – by people holding quart-sized beers in their hands, and thus qualifies as an activity, along with softball, NASCAR and darts.

Not that the girls had quart-sized beers. Just that they could have, in theory. When they get older.

This year we decided to enroll them in classes, in part because it sounded like fun – it certainly was fun the time I tried it – and in part because it’s something that will get them out of the house on a winter morning. Today was the second class, and the first one that I got to go see.

It certainly looked like a good time.

The rocks were flying, the crowd was into it, and the chatter looked positive.

Now all we need is to get them each a new pair of pants.

A Tree Died For You

How bad do things have to get when you spend an entire week trying to find a time to decorate a Christmas tree?

On Sunday we went out and, in the spirit of true Christian fellowship and love, killed a tree. We do this every other year around here, when we’re going to be spending Christmas in Wisconsin. It’s part of a much longer tradition in my family that stretches back to the 1950s.

Artificial trees are convenient and somewhat less of a fire hazard if you leave them alone for a few weeks in your living room, but they’re just not the same.

So we drove out to the local tree farm, where they grow these things on purpose, and set off to find the ideal tree.

Now, this is where the generation gap comes into play. My own father conditioned me to expect this process to take anywhere up to an entire presidential term, as the perfect tree is a rather elusive prey. Not that it can run away or anything – just that its camouflage mechanisms are excellent. My daughters, however, were ready to take pretty much any vaguely conical evergreen that looked like it might fit onto the roof of the car.

So there was a certain amount of back and forth, shall we say.

Eventually we settled on one – a fir that, as we later discovered, smelled strongly of tangerines. But it had very soft needles in contrast with the last tree we got, a tree that was clearly made by Dwarves as a weapon. This one? Green-colored orange meringue pie.

Naturally, it had to die.

We got it home and put it in the garage for safe keeping. On Tuesday I hauled it into the house and set it up on the stand in the living room, and since then it has been something of a battle trying to find a time when all four of us are a) home, b) awake, c) motivated, and d) not consumed by other activities, such as homework, class prep, household chores, or Mythbusters.

You would be surprised at how few and far between those times are.

We did get some decorating done during Wednesday’s episode of Mythbusters, but since then we have come to something of a halt.

Well, we’ve got two more weeks to get things situated, and somewhere in that time there will be a moment or two to devote to this task.

In the meantime, there is eggnog.

Mmmm.  Eggnog.

Say What?

I never used to have an accent.

Oh, I had certain regional peculiarities in how I pronounced words and in which words I chose to use in given situations. But until I was in my late twenties everyone else around me had the same ones, and as far as I was concerned that meant that other people had accents. In Philadelphia we spoke the language the way it was meant to be spoken, obviously enough. Everyone around me agreed.

This held true even in college, where I was the local boy – actually born at the hospital attached to the university, which made college something of a homecoming, I suppose – and it was my roommates and friends who came from other places. My freshman roommate was from Trinidad, for example, and it was fun to listen to the musical cadences of the tone of his voice clashing against the stark crudity of the actual expressions that were apparently in common use on that island, at least among young men. Needless to say it was easy and enjoyable to figure out what he was saying and I wish I could remember more of it, though where exactly I would use those phrases without getting thrown face first into the street I am not sure anymore.

Then I moved to Pittsburgh, where the locals insisted on speaking as if they were gargling razor blades.

“Y’inz gahn aht ‘n’at?” they would ask each other. “Yeah! Gahn dahntahn, watch the Stillers, have an Imp’n’irn and a Jumbo sammich.” “Get aht!” *

It was as if I had moved to Mars.

Except that Mars was just outside of Pittsburgh, and I was living in the city itself. Seriously – there is a community named Mars there. It is not far from Moon Township. And thus one of the first newspaper headlines I ever saw in Pittsburgh, tucked in the back pages where the good news gets exiled: “Mars Woman Marries Moon Man.”

Sweet dancing monkeys on a stick what have I gotten myself into, I thought to myself.

I now live in the midwest, and it is clear to me that somebody around here has an accent, even if it is me.

One of the things I learned in a class in college is that you can tell a lot about where someone grew up by how they pronounce the following list of words:

Mary

Marry

Merry

Murray

To me, growing up in Philadelphia, the last two are identical and pronounced more or less the way most other people pronounce the one with the “u.” The first two are pronounced differently, both from each other and from the last two.

I was amazed when I learned this. I called my mother and had her try it. “Hey!” I said. “You say them the same way I do!” There was a long pause on the line at that point. “You mean to tell me,” she said, “that the person who taught you how to speak pronounces things like you do?”

Sarcasm – it’s a family tradition.

Here in the midwest, though, the first three words are identical and pronounced more or less the way most people pronounce the proper name, while the last one is pronounced the normal way (i.e. the way I do – what else did you think I meant?).

You would think this would be just a fun little academic exercise to distract you from the crushing knowledge that there are still people out there who think Sarah Palin is presidential material, but it’s not. It has actual consequences in my house.

You see, I married a midwesterner and live on her turf.

This means we have some strange moments in our house.

For example, out on the Wisconsin River there is a transportation service called the Merrimac Ferry. To me, this is pronounced to rhyme with “furry,” but out here it rhymes with “fairy.” Thus Kim came into the room one evening as I was watching the news to find me laughing uncontrollably at the announcement that the Merrimac Fairy had been closed for the winter due to ice.

Let me just say that the mental images were compelling.

On top of that, we are friends with a woman named Kerri and another woman named Carrie, both of whom we see in work and social settings.

I can never tell which one Kim is talking about when she brings them up, because to me they are clearly different sounds, but to her midwestern ear both names are pronounced the same and rhyme with Mary.

Someday that’s going to get me into a world of trouble.


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Translation: “Are you [all] going out?” “Yes, we are going downtown to watch the Steelers [play football]. We will have an [Imperial] whiskey and [Iron City] beer, and perhaps a bologna sandwich as well.” “Cool!”

Camouflage...

...you're doing it wrong.

First Snow

Turns out it was a good move to get the Christmas lights up when I did. I do not do ladder work in the snow.

We got our first real snowstorm last night, here in Baja Canada – four inches of the good stuff. This just barely qualified as worth shoveling by Wisconsin standards, but since it was the inaugural run of the season the air was filled with the sound of snowblower engines early this morning. One thing I’ve learned since moving to Our Little Town is that one should never get between a small town man and an excuse to use something with a two-cycle engine.

Another is that you’d better get with that program if you want to fit in with the neighbors.

And so there I was as well, cheerfully plowing through the snow with my little machine, waving to the other guys on the block in manly small town solidarity. I’d better be careful, though. Could lead to deer hunting.

Of course the girls were just ecstatic about the whole thing, even though the storm kept getting cut back from the eight inches it was initially announced to be. It was snow, it covered the ground, and that was good enough.

We usually lose sight of the lawn around this time of year. It will reappear sometime in March, in all likelihood, ready to make further demands on this indoorsman’s time. But until then I can ignore it and let the Christmas lights bathe the snow in peaceful blue.

The Great War in Modern Memory

I find myself becoming more and more interested in World War I recently.

This is an inexplicable thing. Most people do not suddenly seize upon a 95-year-old conflict and begin to read up on it for the fun of it.

“Oh,” you say, “but you are a historian. You are not most people. You often seize upon things that nobody today really pays any attention to and begin to read up on them for the fun of it, so long as those things happened in the past. This is one of the reasons why you do not get invited to parties very often.”

True enough.

But, it must be said, World War I has hitherto not been one of those things. Mostly I have confined my random history seizures to things like 18th-century American political culture (my chosen field), 17th-century England, modern America since 1960, or World War II (which, along with the Civil War, is the gateway drug of American history – the thing that snags people when they are young and impressionable and draws them in deeper and deeper until finally they are out on the streets hawking their furniture to pay their library fines.)

World War II is a harsh mistress.

Part of this fascination for World War I is no doubt the fact that I have just been covering it in my Western Civ II class. The "Roots of World War I" lecture is my favorite of the semester, as it covers a 50-year period of Europeans carefully setting up tripwires guaranteed to create a cataclysmic war, and then in one afternoon in Sarajevo in 1914 they all go off. It’s fun to set it all up and watch it all fall down like that.

Part of it is also my long-standing love of all things Tolkien. JRR Tolkien was a soldier in the Great War, a man who saw combat on the Western Front and survived the war largely because he came down with trench fever and had to be shipped home before his unit was annihilated. I just finished reading a book that covers this sequence of events, though whether this is a cause or effect of the current fascination is debatable, as it was an interesting if seriously flawed book.

There are probably other reasons behind this as well, should I care to explore further. But in truth, I don’t. That would probably lead me to questioning the whole enterprise and losing interest, and I think I’d rather just focus on the history and enjoy it.