“hypercompetent”

In a recent article on Slate here, I ran across the following sentence:

“One of the most important figures in the presidential campaign this fall is a controversial, hypercompetent blonde.” (my emphasis)

I find the term “hypercompetent” to be a bit oxymoronic. It’s like saying hypermediocre. Is it really a compliment? Is this ultimately sexist? Was the author trying to avoid using some male-oriented word to describe an ambitious, successful woman? Why reference her hair color?

Recently, polyglot conspiracy has posted about the sexism in the current political media coverage, and this may be an example

"Love Means Never Having to Say ..."

There is a talented Cuban blogger named Yoani Sánchez at Generation Y. She's a wonderful writer and thoughtful blogger. The fact that she's managed to maintain her blogging life while explicitly repressed by her government (they've taken away her passport, amongst other things) is inspiring. (HT Daily Dish)

But I'm a linguist, so let's get down to business. As far as I can tell, she blogs in THREE languages!! Spanish, German, and English. Her most up-to-date posts appear to be in Spanish, so I presume this is her blog language of choice. However, as the weeks and months go by, some of her older posts appear in either English or German translations. I'm curious to know if she is translating these herself, or getting someone to translate for her? Some of the English is quite good and enjoyable (with occasional stutters, of course).

The current English post (from March 5) is on apologies. Linguist have long been interested in the apology as a speech act, of course. There are whole subfields of Sociolinguistics and discourse pragmatics devoted it.

I've long felt that my use of the casual apology has little to do with any attempt on my part to ask for forgiveness. The most common situation in which I use "I'm sorry" or "excuse me" is one where someone else has made a mistake of some sort. Imagine I'm walking in to a store and someone has mistaken used the entrance as the exit and he bumps into me. I would most likely mumble lightly, "oops, sorry". Clearly, I am not at fault, yet I issue the apology. Why?

Here is my I-haven't-read-Grice-in-years analysis: by taking blame, so to speak, I am able to quickly signal to the offender that I am not issuing blame to them. Since they know they are to blame and not me (and they know that I know, blah blah blah), they can infer via the Maxim of Quality that I must be saying something else, like an indirect speech act. Using some chain of Gricean inference, they can probably construct the interpretation that I'm really saying "no apology is necessary".

It is an easy way for me to diffuse their trepidation about MY reaction. At around 6 foot 4 inches and 260lbs, I know I'm an intimidating presence. I don't want the other person to feel that their small mistake will be turned into a big one by the overreaction of some lumbering giant (actually, I'm quite quick on my feet, I was a helluva wrestler once, ya know).

So, here's 11 ways to say you're sorry (HT SenseList)

Catalan: Ho sento
Croatian: Žao mi je
Czech: Promiňte
Danish: Undskyld
Finnish: Anteeksi
Flemish: Het spijt me
Hungarian: Sajnos
Luxembourgish: Et deet mer leed
Maltese: Ma nitkellimx bil-Malti
Norwegian: Beklager
Polish: Przepraszam

Cheers.

The Perils of Planning

I just can’t get this construction to work for me:

“Such a decision would give Clinton an estimated 55 or more delegates than Obama, according to Clinton campaign operatives.”

This comes from Huffington Post contributer Thomas B. Edsall. To me, the construction “or more” must always be optional. In other words, you should always be able to delete “or more” and the sentence should mean roughly the same thing. But in this case, deleting “or more” would cause clear ungrammaticality to ensue:

*Such a decision would give Clinton an estimated 55 delegates than Obama…

Ugh!

My guess is that Edsall had a “X more Y than Z” construction planned, then decided to throw in a little “or more” for flavor, but he was faced with the catastrophic prospect of TWO more’s in ONE sentence, right next to each other! Gasp! That can’t be right, right?

*Such a decision would give Clinton an estimated 55 or more more delegates than Obama…

Well, for this speaker of Northern California English (truly, the finest of all the Englishes, as well you may know), “or more more” sounds better than the original.

Iron Man Linguistics

I just saw Iron Man (no no, this is not another movie review ... but you can still read my Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Juno discussions). There is an interesting linguistic side-point to be made about language diaspora in Afghanistan. As the movie opens, our hero, Tony Stark, is kidnapped near Bagram Air Base in northwest Afghanistan's Parwan Province. He is held captive with one other prisoner, a local Afghani doctor named Yinsin (a name carried over from the original comic book I believe, so not particularly Afghani) who says he's from a small town named "Gulmira" (I couldn't find any real town by that name, though it seems to be a fairly common given name). Luckily for Stark, Yinsin speaks "many languages", so he's able to understand some of their captors' shouts and orders, but not all (an interesting aside, the actor who plays Yinsin, Shaun Toub, has a backstory worthy of its own screenplay).

You see, the group which has kidnapped the unfortunate pair goes undefined throughout the movie. We are largely left to draw our own conclusions about their origin, ideology, and motivation (though we get some minor clarification late in the movie). The one thing we learn about their diversity is that they speak a wide variety of languages, as Yinsin lists some of them for Stark. I don't remember the full list, but I believe they included "Arabic, Ashkun, Farsi, Pashto" amongst others. So, kudos to the screenwriters for, in the very least, scanning Ethnologue for an appropriate set of languages to list.

But there's one other language that Yinsin mentions, and it got my attention: Hungarian. A few scenes after Yinsin lists the various languages the group speaks (a list that does not include Hungarian), he and Stark are being yelled at by an unnamed thug. Stark asks Yinsin what he's saying and Yinsin says something like "I don't know. He's speaking Hungarian."

This was meant as a bit of comic relief, I believe. So the screenwriters may have chosen Hungarian at random. Perhaps any language that American audiences would perceive as unusual or unexpected would have done the trick. Perhaps it would have been even funnier if he said "I dunno, he's speaking Comanche (ba dum boom!)." I don't know, but my linguistics radar picked it up and I went searching for any connections Hungary might have with Afghanistan.

Alas, I have found few. I would have to make some serious leaps of logic to connect the dots, and I don't think the movie was going for that. The clarifying scenes late in the movie suggest that this groups' motivations are largely financial, not ideological or political, so we might assume this was some random Hungarian mercenary. As far as I can tell, this is the most logically consistent interpretation (unless I've misunderstood the movie's plot or dialogue, in which case ... never mind).

"Bollywood Bistro"

UB's campus cuisine took a massive step forward this semester when we finally got an on-campus Indian restaurant (more than a decade after the great influx of Indian grad students would have made it an obvious trend). It's classic UB to finally allow a restaurant that caters to vegetarians only when I'm finishing, never to be a student here again.

But it's the name that really caught my eye: Bollywood Bistro. It's a great multi-cultural blend of the classic French bistro, paragon of 20th century Euro-cuisine (where bland is a compliment), refashioned by the post-colonial vibrance of the 21st century's most diverse culture/s. The term "Bollywood" itself screams to be unpacked (a blend of "Bombay" and "Hollywood"). How could I not make this a regular lunch spot, even as the University's lungs spew its breathy deadline down my neck.

Smitten with Kunis

This is another, still rare, non-linguistics post about movies (I suppose I could try to draw some connection to the Netflix Prize or Recommender Systems, but, yawn, this is what it is, a movie post).

I watched Forgetting Sarah Marshall yesterday. I feel the need to defend that choice, but I’ll do that later. After seeing it, I find I’m smitten with Mila Kunis, and not just because her name is Mila Kunis. I knew of Kunis through That 70s Show (although, like most people, I stopped watching midway through the third season, and that was a long time ago), but more through her voicing of Meg on Family Guy.

In Forgetting Sarah Marshall she is given the right blend of sweetness and tenacity to play to her talents (her screaming match with an ex-boyfriend was literally laugh-out-loud funny) plus she has an awesome tan. Her tan is so awesome, it’s like a separate character. They could have just put Kunis and her tan next to the ocean and I probably would have watched for the same 112 minute run time. It’s an impressive feat to get a Ukrainian THAT tan and not kill her. I don’t know what combination of chemicals and baby oil they used, but it worked. Zonker Harris would be proud.

And this is the essential hook, isn’t it? In order for a romantic comedy to work, the viewer has to become smitten with one of the leads (or both, if that’s your thang baby, make Paglia proud … on a random related note, is Torchwood the most bi-curious TV show in history?). In any case, I walked away from this movie smitten with Mila Kunis.

While watching this movie, I couldn’t help but reflect on the lack of women in Hollywood who have the two most important characteristics of a romantic comedy lead: adorability and comedic talent. Meg Ryan had lots of one and little of the other; frikkin Sandra Bullock had neither yet still managed a decade long career.

Kunis has both. She’s cute as all hell and she can bring the funny (and did I mention the awesome tan?). The only other actress today with both of these crucial qualities (sans tan) is Ellen Page (my first impression of her is here) but I fear Page may be limited to the wise-cracking smart-ass. I haven’t seen her step out of that role yet (even her small roles in the X-Men movies had this tinge to them).

Unfortunately, since the corporate takeover of Hollywood in the 1980s, the romantic comedy has been staffed by pretty dolls with little talent (both male and female). But this is why most romantic comedies fail. They have dull leads. The corporate suits create a table of demographics, then plot a script accordingly, then plug in the two actors de jour and voilà!

Now the romantic comedy may finally be coming out of its stupor. Forgetting Sarah Marshall is the latest installment of Apatow Inc’s refashioning of the genre, and god bless ‘em because most romantic comedies suck.

Box Office Mojo has a list of the 300 top grossing romantic comedies since 1978, and it’s depressing. The highest grossing romantic comedy of all time is, by itself, reason to contemplate suicide. Even as you scan the large list of movies, it’s a wasteland of forgetability. But that’s the downside. The upside is that the romantic comedy genre has produced a handful of unforgettable films like His Girl Friday, Harold and Maude, and Annie Hall. There is nothing wrong with the genre itself. Hell, most epic poems suck ass, but that’s no reason to throw out The Odyssey.

More to the point, there are good romantic comedies (and John Cusack has been in most of them; if you haven’t seen Grosse Point Blank or High Fidelity, you’re missing out). I've highly recommended Juno as a great version of the genre (regardless of what my colleague may think, thppt!), but I can't equate Forgetting Sarah Marshall with Juno, smitten or not. But it is a good romantic comedy, just worth the matinée price I paid.

And that brings me to my reasons for choosing this particular film. I have no shame in going to see a romantic comedy, because I want to see another Annie Hall. I want the genre to succeed. I think Apatow Inc. stresses writing and comedy talent more than most producer-driven entourages, so they’re producing films that, in the very least, are funny and entertaining. Plus, I was bored and M. Faust gave it a good review, even though he doesn’t mention Mila Kunis (Bastard! Did you not see her awesome tan?).

"LingPipe, I hate you"

Actually, no, I do not hate LingPipe. But someone does. It is the entertaining aspect of Sitemeter that led me to this discovery.

Occasionally I check my Sitemeter page view details because it's comforting to see that people actually do read my blog (even if y'all don't comment, thpppt!) . But far more entertainment value is gained from the information about how someone came to my site. I can see what search words brought someone here. I've been collecting some of the more amusing ones and I've been meaning to post about it, but today I discovered someone had gotten to my blog by searching Google for, and I quote, "lingpipe ihate you".

I don't know what deviltry the evil duo at LingPipe is up to, but they appear to have made an enemy.