Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

The one thing about discord that I wish I could get on Signal is different names for different group chats. I'm the only Firstname Lastname LinkedIn-sona in this new trans group I've joined; everyone else has a single lowercase noun for a name, like a normal person.

I hosted a hybrid meeting today, and when D asked who was coming, the names I gave him were one animal, two vegetable, and one mineral.

Conservatives think "diversity" is nonsense and progressives might think it's at best a nice-to-have if there's a budget for it once all the "real" stuff has been sorted out.

But it's not nonsense and it's not just for warm fuzzy feelings! It keeps you from writing "tits" in Spanish on a lot of hats that you then can't sell and everyone laughs at you.

We might be doing something uncharacteristic for us in taking an all-inclusive package holiday at all, l but D and I are so very ourselves.

He's been studying maps of the town and the island, and I've been reading about the local language varieties.

That page starts with

Canarian Spanish heavily influenced the development of Caribbean Spanish and other Latin American Spanish vernaculars because Hispanic America was originally largely settled by colonists from the Canary Islands...

Which is news to my ears because my only education in Spanish was in a high school in the U.S., so of course I learned the Spanish standards of the Americas rather than of Europe. My high school Spanish is actually doing a surprisingly good job here. I can't believe I remember as much as I do!

I had to do a scary thing at work, which is tell an email chain made up of people more senior than me that a couple of them are barking up an unhelpful tree.

I can tell I was scared because I got more formal in my language. "Positioning themselves as the beneficiaries..."

I even changed a "while" to "whilst," which I hate because it feels so pretentious to me, but I know it's just a normal word for Brits and I'm trying to seem normal to them.

An Australian friend told me "Whilst, amongst, amidst, unbeknownst, some of Australians’ favourite words!"

Which I thought was interesting because I feel very differently about all of those words.

1. Unbeknownst: great, wish I got to use it more but sadly it's so rare
2. Amidst: good
3. Amongst: fine, but I would reach for among first, myself
4. Whilst: makes my teeth hurt

So it's not just the -st ending! Something else must be going on in my brain.

Today was great too.

We slept in -- I got something like eleven hours of sleep. Basically uninterrupted. That's like two nights of sleep for me normally. It has made such a difference.

And then we went to Brugge, which is better known as Bruges but I am calling Brugge for two reasons:

1. That's what it calls itself (it's in the Dutch-speaking part of the country)

2. I'm so relieved that not everything is in French. By last night when D was doing his duolingo practice before bed, I was already so tired of reading and hearing French, after a mere eight hours in Brussels*, that I thought I might cry.

I was also, to be fair, overtired from the plane travel (it's rough when any flight is delayed for an hour but when you've been on the increasingly-ill-ventilated and overheating plane for most of that hour, and when the flight was only supposed to be an hour long to begin with, and the heat and staleness of the air make you feel nauseous and you end up being unable to eat until that evening...), and from all the walking which was hard not on my ankle specifically but on both legs because the muscles just aren't used to walking this much again yet...

On top of all that, hearing and seeing a language I don't know all the time all around me (even D, who was practicing by doing as much of his usual chatter as possible in French, presumably to make it easier to use it when he needed it) was just too much.

Of course I don't know Dutch any more than I do French really. But I've done a few duolingo lessons on it myself, and I know the tiniest bit of German. It felt so nice to have the person who handed D his change after buying a postcard say (something that sounded like, even if it wouldn't be spelled as) "danke schön," or to have the elevator taking us to the track our train was leaving from, 7, say something which even in its muffled automatic voice sounded enough like "sieben und acht" that I delightedly said "sieben und acht!" back at it; not quite the same but enough that I felt reassured I was in the right place.

Oh wait I just thought of a third reason too:

1. If you say you're "in Brugge," no one makes references to a movie I haven't seen

* Maybe I should start calling it Brussel, for consistency. Why does English need that extra s anyway?! There's enough s's in the word already.

This morning I said "I'm so tired that I'm yawning so hard that the yawns themselves are making me more exhausted."

This is no fun except that it meant that an online friend of mine told me "we have a saying in french, ''bailler à s'en décrocher la mâchoire'' : yawning so much your jaw detached"

That is exactly how I felt.

Always good to find yourself tagged in something like this on social media:

I feel like I'm losing my mind, I don't hear anything "crispy" about this??? Erik help???

I clicked on the link, which actually does a pretty good job of explaining what I know about /r/ in English (the slashes around it are just how linguists indicate that a symbol is representing a sound). I impatiently scrolled past the words "bunched," "retroflex" and "spectrogram," because I know what all those have to do with /r/ and I had never heard of crispy r, so I had work to do! There were a lot of question marks in my friend's message! This looks like an emergency!

"Just watch the video," the article says, so I spent three tries attempting to wrangle tiktok in my browser (you can't scroll forward through a video! it tried so hard to get me to "log in to TikTok!" even though that is a thing I will never do!) only to find out that it's just a person saying other people, very few of whom I've ever knowingly heard speak, have crispy r's.

So I wouldn't recommend that. (I felt so old, not only failing to navigate tiktok but also feeling attacked by it as an experience.)

Finally, I found this:

Every crispy R seems to be retroflex, but not every retroflex R sounds audibly crispy.

(It isn't really important what retroflex means here, just that it's one of the two main ways that English speakers make /r/s. If you want to know what it means, the article explains it really well!)

Okay, so which retroflex r's are crispy?

[Linguist Tara] McAllister suggests that what might be happening is that, well, it’s not really about the R, but rather what the R does to a neighboring sound. A consonant such as K or B is called a “stop,” which means it is a sound that requires the cessation of noise. As you transition from that to an R sound—in a word like “crispy”—the shape of your tongue will change the path of the burst of air used for the combined sound. In “crispy,” according to this theory, it’s not the R that’s crispy. It’s the K.

(I don't think that's quite right either, because you need both. The /k/ (or /b/, or whatever) might make the /r/ crispy, but neither thing is sufficient alone.)

Today an internet friend said

Caught myself quoting someone "ninety quid" for something, and it got me thinking about what point quids become pounds. You never really hear somebody say "that'll be one thousand eight hundred and twenty four quid" or whatever do you

This is such a great question! It made my little linguistics-undergrad heart so happy. Because we all have a pretty refined and regulated internal sense of the languages we speak well, but almost all of it is subconscious. Because the language features we pay attention to and have particular associations with (like saying "wooder" for water) are just the tip of the iceberg. We follow patterns all the time but don't know that we have developed those patterns.

Especially in relatively informal language use -- because we may be taught how to speak/write "properly" but no one tells us overtly how to talk to our peers or how to play with language. That stuff isn't valued as highly -- sometimes that's even treated as if it's in opposition to "proper" language, like fifteen years ago when old people worried that txt spk would render students literally unable to spell anything in the standard way for their schoolwork.

But yeah. No one ever taught me when to say "pounds" and when to say "quid," and I'd never thought about it before, but when I saw this question I immediately

1) recognized the distinction between naming amounts of money as either "pounds" and "quid" as something familiar to me (even though I didn't start using the word quid until my 20s, and at first was told not to use it because it sounded wrong in my accent!

and

2) had an idea already that felt plausible for what the distinction might be

Other respondents had their own theories -- most taking the question at face value and replying with what they thought the cutoff is where quid changes to pounds, like "over a thousand" or "over two thousand" -- but I of course had to problematize the very assumptions of the question itself.

I said that I think there's kind of a cutoff (I said 100) but also that any round number can be quid: not just their "ninety quid" quote but, say, "nine thousand quid" or "90 million quid." Sentences like "he spent almost nine thousand quid on his car" or "the government has wasted 90 million quid on this" seem perfectly fine to me. My (completely off-the-cuff) theory is that a round number can indicate a certain amount of informality. I guess that I think round numbers feel less formal? There's the potential for a "this is close enough" vibe that makes it suit the informal register of "quid."

I wonder (though now I'm thinking about it too much and can't trust myself) if there's an difference of emphasis there too? "The government wasted a million quid" feels more forceful to me than "the government wasted a million pounds." Maybe this is a phonetics thing? Quid has the sharp plosives to begin and end on, and only that little vowel in the middle. Pounds ends in that lingering fricative, and the vowel is so open and feels longer to say because it's a diphthong. (That's all speculation, I don't know phonetics at all.)

What do you think? If you talk about quid and pounds (or dollars and bucks, or any currency that has a common slang term), do you feel like there is a pattern your brain uses to choose one word over the other? What's the pattern?

1. Can you diagram a sentence?
I sure can. Well, I could five years ago. packbat asked a very good question -- "why do sentence diagrams put the verb at the top?" -- and in my attempt at figuring out this thing that I probably got taught but do not remember, I looked at some wikipedia pages because I couldn't even remember the name of the kind I'd learned in my syntax class. Eventually words like x-bar theory and lexical-functional grammar started to ring a bell. I learned how to make diagrams that look like this:

2. What word do you always spell wrong, no matter what?
I used to be fine but now I can't remember how many R's embarrass has.

3. What word always looks like it's spelled wrong to you but isn’t?
Honestly so many British spellings still look wrong to me after almost 20 years. Especially the extra vowels: my initial reaction to things like "foetus" is still what is that, that's not a word I know. It's bad when they team up too: colourise has both the -our and the -ise endings and that's just not fair.

4. Do you have any little memory games when it comes to similar words, like principle and principal?
Stalactite has a C in it because it comes out of the ceiling. Stalagmite is, uh, the other one.

5. Was grammar something you enjoyed or detested in school?
I didn't study it until college! When I was an English major there was a class called Grammar & Language which everyone talked about like it was the worst thing ever, so I planned to avoid but then I had to take it one semester because my schedule clashed with my other options. The "Language" part ended up being the history of the language, and between that and "grammar," this was my first exposure to linguistics. I adored it. I was sufficiently convinced to take Old English (this professor's specialty) the next year. I then realized -- at the end of my junior year in a school that didn't offer it -- is what I should have been studying in the first place. And which I spent 15 years feeling bad about until I went on to do just that!

Before that, I thought I enjoyed grammar but what I actually enjoyed was reading parts of our English textbooks that we never studied in class, and just reading a lot anyway, and getting from this a pretty good idea of how "correct" English should be, which I was relieved to be good at since I didn't feel good at much else, and which I was delighted to weaponize over others who were less good at it. It was only in adulthood that I realized how racist, ableist, and otherwise bigoted this idea of a single correct English which all else should aspire to is, and how much harm it does. I learned how arbitrary standards are in language; they are, like all else about it, just made up by people and they could just as easily be different than they are. I used to call myself a grammar nazi proudly, but it turns out that power-dynamic control-freak shit isn't grammar, and we've had real nazis all along.

Here's a cool thing, linguistics research about Manchester, done by a person I really liked as a lecturer.

Linguistics expert Dr Maciej Baranowski wanted to find out whether there is any linguistic evidence for the popular view that the north Manchester accent sounds different from the one spoken in south Manchester. He talked to 122 people from areas within the M60 motorway, as well as those immediately to the south such as Wythenshawe and Stockport.

He found that the so-called ‘north-force distinction’ – where words like four and wore have a different vowel sound to for and war – is disappearing in the south and centre of the city. It has completely disappeared from the speech of middle-class Mancunians, so for them, the words in these pairs sound identical - as they do for most speakers of English today.

The age patterns in Maciej’s data suggest that this vowel contrast began disappearing from middle class speech in Manchester decades ago, and while is still surprisingly strong in north Manchester, it is gradually changing there as well – albeit very slowly.

The spellings of these words give a clue about how different they once sounded, but ‘dialect levelling’ has led to British English being much more uniform than it once was. Some long-standing aspects of local accents are disappearing, and other features are spreading across the country.

There definitely is the idea that North and South Manchester have noticeably different accents. It's lovely to have someone actually go and check on that, though.

I'm always irrationally sad to hear about vowel mergers (even though I have plenty; usually cot-caught and definitely marry/merry/Mary). It feels like we're losing something in a way that leaves me more sad than we should. I never even knew there could be a distinction between "for" and "four", and here it is hanging on in the part of Manchester where I first came to visit the city (Crumpsall/Blackley, that was).