Language in a Time of Pandemic

Over the past few weeks, many of you language log authors have posted about language in the time of Corona virus. In case you are curious about these connections, here's a list (if I missed any please make your additions in the comments!)

• Mitch closely examines four words connected to the Language of the Coronavirus World.

•  Jacob give advice to deal with the fact that Online Language Learning Sucks!  Kasia, does, too, in her Language Learning in a Time of Coronavirus, which also had advice for supporting your health (mental, physical, emotional...). 

• Ya'Nassia remind us about the dangers of calling this virus a name connected to people in You Would Be Surprised (Chapter Seven). Izzy does, too, in her COVID-19 Blog Post

• Kira connects to an article about medical translation in Translation in a Global Pandemic, for example, translation when Chinese doctors go to Italy to share their hard-won expertise.

A couple writers are hearing their local home accents with new ears and writing about that, too:

• Emily in North Attleborough, Massachusetts
• Mitch in the Finger Lake area of New York

Washington DC accent - yes, there is one, says linguists

Last week, I heard a radio story on NPR that caught my eyes, - um - my ears. The local station, based here at AU, has a series called "What's with Washington?" in which people can write in questions, the reporters/editors choose some, research and present some answers. So someone asked whether DC has an accent. 

When I mention this question to friends, family, and colleagues, their first reaction is surprise and a touch of confusion as they contemplate it. When one thinks of US accents, DC doesn't come to mind - I think New England, Boston, Chicago, NYC, Texan, Southern, CA, Baltimore....but not DC.

image from: https://www.mimicmethod.com/best-accent-learn/

The radio story calls attention to the difficulty in identifying a DC accent: it's a very transitory community with many people moving into and moving out of the area, which means that we can hear a lot of different accents in the city. The story also calls attention to the socioeconomic nature of our ideas of accent in a geographic region (think who move$ in and out), and it discusses issues of identity and language variation. This radio story discusses accents through examples of people on-the-street plus input from linguists - including AU's own WLC Professor Chip Gerfen!

And, yes, there is a DC accent. In order to find it, the story presents linguists who present information about accents generally, and - through a doctoral linguistics student at Georgetown who talks about light bulbs on a light board - specifically.

So what is the accent?

The D.C. sound comes from ... vowel centralization, R-lessness, and monophthongization

Whaaaa?! Well, read the story if you want to know those three terms for increasing your linguistic jargon vocabulary. But, really, listen to the story to hear the accent and discussion. https://wamu.org/story/16/07/07/is_there_a_washington_dc_accent/

WOTY - Word of the Year Lists

This language-themes writing seminar is a spring course, and as such it starts just as the WOTYs (word-of-the-years) come out. I hear or see snippets on various media about this WOTY or that, so for this post I am collecting a few of them and musing.

Who choses WOTYs? It depends.

The linguists choose one through the American Dialect Society. Mirriam-Webster, of dictionary fame, crowdsources its choice. Oxford University Press gathers a team of editors, lexicographers, and - um - marketers together to choose a word. Dictionary.com bases its choice on searches of its site along with prominent news stories.

Image from https://www.rd.com/culture/word-of-the-year/

What are 2019 words?

• (my) pronouns (American Dialect Society) click the link at the bottom of the ADS page to get a full list of categories, including sksksksksk deemed by ADS to be one of the most creative WOTYs of 2019)
• They (Mirriam Webster)
  
• Climate Emergency (Oxford) all of its runner-ups are climate-related, too, including flightshame
• Existential (dictionary.com)

 It's not just an English thing; organizations post for other languages, too. For example, every October the Japanese Kanji Proficiency Society announces a kanji that voters choose to represent the events in Japan over the past year.

The character “rei” (令) — as used in the era name of Reiwa, which has been translated to mean “beautiful harmony” — was chosen as kanji of the year
Rei, on its own, means “order,” “command” or “auspicious.” But this year’s choice was derived from the name of the new era that began after Emperor Naruhito ascended to the throne on May 1.

So what? Who cares? (I offer these two questions in the spirit of Graff and Birkenstein's chapter of the same name in They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing. In some sense sarcastic, but in a sincere sense actually answering those questions, for if no one cares and it doesn't matter, why write about it?)

In some ways, WOTYs seem rather trivial. What does one do with these words anyhow? I think, like annual end-of-year lists, a WOTY tries to encapsulate something about the past year, at least, what is important to the people who chose it. For that reason, I specifically wrote above not only who publishes a WOTY, but who chooses the word for that publication.

When I look at the WOTYs for 2019, they're weighty, serious. Each word could start a long conversation about how it represents, or not, the year. While Oxford's past lists might have included lighter words such as selfie  and sudoku, such a trend does not seem to be at work for the crowdsourcing list of dictionary.com.  Let's take a look at the past 10 years

• 2019: Existential
• 2018: Misinformation
• 2017: Complicit
• 2016: Xenophobia
• 2015: Identity
• 2014: Exposure
• 2013: Privacy
• 2012: Bluster
• 2011: Tergiversate (okay, I didn't know this word; it's the second new English word I have seen this week - which is totally exciting to me. "Tergiversate" means "to evade, to equivocate using subterfuge; to deliberately obfuscate")
• 2010: Change

At the end of a CNN article about existential as last year's word, the author concludes "Here's to hoping next year's word will be "puppies.""

In conclusion....  I don't know what WOTYs all add up to. Most of me thinks "interesting, but not anything to deeply think about - a nice party conversation starter." But maybe, with time and more reflection, I'll come up with a better "so what" for WORTYs and what they reveal about their creators and consumers. 

Language change versus Trademark law

Once again, the inspiration for a post comes as I drink my coffee and listen to WAMU. This morning I heard a story that made me think of the mostly futile efforts to control language use; people innovate language, laws try to interfere, yet language keeps evolving.

The story was about a trademark lawsuit.  The story "Adventure Series Book Publisher Sues Netflix over Trademark" describes how the company that makes the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books, one of my childhood favorites, has filed a case against Netflix because on its Black Mirror show, "Bandersnatch" uses technology to create a choose-your-own-adventure television episode. The specific problem alleged in the lawsuit is that the TV characters describe the format using just that phrase - "choose your own adventure" - and the book publishing company does not want people confusing the TV version with their books.

Zipper was once a trademarked brand name
Image from https://mymodernmet.com/jun-kitagawa-zipper-art/

So what about language? Well, a trademark lawyer quoted in the radio story said that this lawsuit was about a concept called genericide, when a trademarked name becomes so popular that the name becomes a common noun. For example, people say "band aid" to mean any bandage for a cut, not specifically the Band Aid type bandage.  I knew about that example, but the story brought others to my attention, words that I never knew had started with a brand name, such as zipper and escalator. A Toronto Blade article about brands becoming generic names says that thermos, aspirin, and yo yo are others. A linguist in that article says that once the process of genericization starts, it cannot be stopped. However, the International Trademark Association notes a couple of examples that did reclaim the name, Goodyear and  Singer, and it has an interesting list of tips on how to avoid genericide.

This process of genericide makes the trademark lose its value. So on the one hand, trademark law helps companies protect their brands, yet, as the lawyer in the radio story notes, "...trademark law is not supposed to withdraw words from the English language," and these lawsuits can fail: a court can rule that the trademark has become a common word and the company can lose a lawsuit.

Side note: as I was writing about this topic, I noticed that some sources used the term genericide  and others used genericization. Genericide has the -cide ending implying a terrible death, and that term appeared in the business sources I read. Genericization doesn't have the same implication and was used by the linguists and in the newspaper article. The different words used by the different communities makes sense to me in terms of the values each group invests in trademarks.

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