Alaskan Range: Sparrows And Rappers
"A recent DailyMail.com story compares sparrows and rappers, saying sparrow singing “is actually an aggressive form of swapping insults. The species’ soothing sounds have a lot in common with the profanity-strewn bragging of rappers, with male sparrows using them to prove how macho they are, and the tougher the area, the more they do so,'' columnist Greg Hill reports.
Our word for today is “adumbrate,” which means “to foreshadow, give a rough outline or disclose partially, to overshadow or obscure.”
It comes from the Latin “umbra,” which means “shade, shadow,” and is the source-word for “umbrella” and “umbrage.” I adumbrated in last week’s column when I wrote about research into where the first words were spoken and how our brains hear the words we read to understand their meanings. That foreshadowed this week’s New Science Magazine article by David Robson that describes how “we seem instinctively to link certain sounds with particular sensory perceptions.”
Linguistic authorities have long maintained that the way words sound is purely arbitrary, but Robson cites researcher Benjamin Bergen, a University of California, San Diego professor, who studies “sound symbolism, words that have similar meaning and sounds.” English words beginning with “sn,” for example, “are often associated with our organ of olfaction: think ‘snout,’ ‘sniff,’ ‘snot,’ ‘snore’ and ‘snorkel.’” Such sets of words are called phonesthemes, a “systematic pairing of form and meaning in a language.”
Speaking of speaking, a recent DailyMail.com story compares sparrows and rappers, saying sparrow singing “is actually an aggressive form of swapping insults. The species’ soothing sounds have a lot in common with the profanity-strewn bragging of rappers, with male sparrows using them to prove how macho they are, and the tougher the area, the more they do so … and just like their human equivalents, most of the boasting and trading of insults is all about impressing the girls.”
“Battle rap” contests among humans involve trading insults that rhyme “against a music background until one of the two is deemed the winner.” The Journal of Behavioural Ecology and Sociobiology reports “sparrows living in more competitive environments are more likely to perform aggressively,” but unlike rap artists, “it is also a behavior more often displayed by belligerent older males.”
I may be an older male, but I believe some old proverbs, like catching more flies with honey than vinegar, still hold true. That’s why I enjoy getting regular fixes of arcane science from amusing sources like “Sci-?nce: a Skeptical Comic and Blog.” The local Guys Read program, created by your friendly local public librarians, has been incredibly successful at convincing fourth grade boys that reading is fun by exposing them to well-illustrated, boy-friendly books that are first and foremost entertaining. “Sci-?nce.org” does the same thing for science.
Author-cartoonists Maki Naro and Nadir Balan “entercate,” combining education with entertainment, by using catchy comic art and unusual topics to lure readers into esoteric scientific topics like sensory integration, “the neurological process of organizing sensation from the body to be able to interact with the environment effectively.” That sounds daunting until illuminated by Naro’s and Balan’s jaunty writing: “Our brains are constantly multitasking, taking in all the sensory input from our seen senses — you thought we had just 5? How cute. … Visual, Auditory, Olfactory, Gustatory, Tactile, Vestibular (balance) and Proprioceptive (position) inputs are processed and interpreted by the brain constantly.”
Sci-?nce.org includes amusing illustrations, like the sculptures showing how a human body would appear if its parts corresponded proportionally to the amount of brain cortex dedicated to its perception. Each of the sculpture’s nerve-rich hands, for example, is four times the size of its body. The hook is in the cleverly-drawn introductory comic, where a Gameboy-playing youth asks his dad “why do people stick out their tongues when concentrating?” Dad responds, “If I said ‘to stifle gustatory sensory integration,’ would that mean anything to you?” “Nope.” “OK, well, in a language you’d understand, the tongue is a RAM whore, so by stopping your tongue you increase your brain RAM to help focus.” “I don’t want to split hairs with you, pops, since you can’t spare any,” the boy smirks, “but what you’re describing is more like adding virtual memory rather than RAM.” “Laugh it up,” says dad, “tomorrow I’ll teach you about hereditary diseases.”
Hereditary disease may be the ultimate foreshadowing adumbration, and these columns sometimes adumbrate by giving only “rough outlines” of some deep topics, and they’re often “obscure.” But remember, you can always turn to your public library, the People’s University for knowledge navigation, sources of understanding, and entercation.
