Alaskan Range: Words
"I treasure all the words that spice up our language.'' declares Greg Hill, bringing us another firecracker of a column.
A colleague recently reminded me that Europe’s International Day of Languages was celebrating their 225 indigenous languages with children’s programs, conferences, and volunteer tutors offering crash courses in foreign languages and dialects. My mental gears ground some, since I was perusing the library’s copy of “The Hippy Dictionary” to look up “neat,” a favorite expression from my pre-”cool” youth. It means “Nice, good or interesting. An understated, yet sincere compliment or statement of approval. Example: ‘Hey, that’s neat; how’d you get that peace sign in the bottle?’
As always happens with arcane dictionaries, other intriguing terms were nearby, many of which are best reserved for conversation between consenting adults. Naughty words are often unusually information-packed. Time.com reported last month about research into “Why Some Languages Sound So Fast” conducted by the Universite de Lyon. Native speakers of French, Spanish, English, German, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, and Vietnamese read aloud twenty different texts in their native language, including: “Last night I opened the front door to let the cat out. It was such a beautiful night that I wandered down to the garden to get a breath of fresh air. Then I heard a click as the door closed behind me.”
Silences longer than 150 milliseconds were edited out, then the syllables were counted and then “analyzed how much meaning was packed into each of those syllables. A single-syllable word like ‘bliss,’ for example, is rich with meaning … The single-syllable word ‘to’ is less information-dense. And a single syllable like the short ‘I’ sound, as in the word ‘jubilee,’ has no independent meaning at all.” The researchers made “two critical values for each language: the average information density for each of its syllables and the average number of syllables spoken per second.” Vietnamese, the least common and “information-dense” of the languages studied, was “given an arbitrary value of 1.”
They found that “the more data-dense the average syllable was, the fewer of those syllables had to be spoken per second – and thus the slower the speech. English, with a high information density of .91, was spoken at an average rate of 6.19 syllables per second. Mandarin, which topped the density list at .94, was the spoken slowpoke at 5.18 syllables per second.” “The true speed demon of the group” was Japanese, with density of .49 and 7.84 syllables per second. Nevertheless, “at the end of, say, a minute of speech, all the languages would have conveyed more or less identical amounts of information.”
Some words convey way too much information. Many Hill family dinner conversations sometimes roam into word-play. There are a surprising number of words that some family members consider intolerable, yet the same term leaves the rest of us unphased. Mention “dollop” to my wife and one daughter and you’ll hear about it. I noticed “dollop” didn’t make “6 Words That Need to Be Banned from the English Language,” forwarded by said daughter from Daniel O’Brien’s “Dan Dan Revolution” website. Some words don’t bother him. “The word ‘partition’ … I have no opinion on it one way or the other. We’re cool, partition. But there are a few words that, very often, make me sick to my stomach.” O’Brien says this complaint is called “word aversion,” which “has nothing to do with meaning and is all about the actual word. Word aversion is, according to Language Log, ‘bred of the mysterious relationships between language, emotion, memory, sound, and mouthfeel.’ Sidebar: ‘Mouthfeel’ is just an awful, awful word. Why would anyone include ‘mouthfeel’ in an essay about word aversion?” For the record, O’Brien’s list of objectionable words includes “moist,” “jowls,” “bulbous,” “yolk,” “slurp,” and “pulp.”
I treasure all the words that spice up our language. Speaking of which, Massachusetts librarian Brian Herzong’s “SwissArmyLibrarian” blog posted tips on how to “Swear Like a Librarian.” “When not at work,” Brian writes, “some librarians I know have the filthiest mouths … But at the reference desk they obviously can’t use bad words.” He polled other librarians and found gems like “Jeepers Crow!,” “What the What?,” “Mother of pearl!,” and the exquisite “Sugar Honey Ice Tea!”
Sometimes, as the philosopher-author Goethe said, “when ideas fail, a word comes in to save the situation.”
