Author: Kirk

Changing One’s Accent, #1

Foreign Languages, Outsider's Perspective

When I was in graduate school in Los Angeles, California, I met a young man who worked as an administrative assistant in my graduate department.

His name was Angus, and he had a Scottish accent.

I finally asked the department’s secretary about his accent, and she said that Angus was from the Valley — as in the San Fernando Valley, north of L.A.

I asked whether Angus originally was from Scotland. The response: “Oh, no. He simply decided to adopt a Scottish accent.”

And, as far as I know, he never broke his Scottish accent for what is called “Valley Talk”, which is a manner of speaking that is characteristic of those from the Valley.

That ability — to change one’s accent permanently — continues to fascinate me today.

To me, it is akin to changing one’s signature, which is difficult but can be done (I know because I did it.), or changing one’s handwriting style, which must be very difficult.

Put simply, changing one’s accent permanently must take a lot of practice, self-awareness, and effort.

What is your favorite story about changing one’s accent? Let me know!

“(… the G1 is NOT even close people)”

Commas, Devolution toward Simpler

I saw this in a comment below a blog post.

Problem:
A comma is missing.

Explanation:
The comment appeared almost immediately below the bottom of a blog post about how Blackberry can beat iPhone.

The commenter wrote “The only known true competition to the iPhone (yes thats right, the G1 is NOT even close people) is the BB Storm.”

Ignore the other problems, and focus on the end of the parenthetical remark.

The comment writer was telling his readers that the T-Mobile G1 cellphone should not be compared to the AT&T iPhone because the G1 is “NOT even close” to the iPhone in terms of features.

The writer was referring to his readers as “people”.

If you say the parenthetical remark aloud in the spirit of what the writer intended, then you will notice that you pause between the word “close” and the word “people”.

This pause should be represented by a comma, which gives us the solution.

In contrast, if you speak the parenthetical remark exactly as it was written, then the sense of the remark becomes twisted to mean that “close people” are not the G1 cellphone, which makes no sense.

I believe that this type of omission of a comma is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis. It is simpler to omit a comma than to write or type one.

Solution:
“(… the G1 is NOT even close, people)”

“Any Occassion Top”

Common English Blunders, Hyphens, Misspellings, Nouns

I saw this last evening on television.

Problems:
1. A word is misspelled.
2. A hyphen is missing.

Explanation:
Fashion designer Tim Gunn has a program on the Bravo television channel called “Tim Gunn’s Guide to Style”.

I saw in the episode last evening on this program a list of what he calls his “10 Essential Elements”; one of the elements was listed as “Any Occassion Top” — with no hyphen and with a second “s” in the second word.

Spelling the noun “Occasion” with a second “s” is a common English blunder.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “occasion” — spelled correctly as O-C-C-A-S-I-O-N — 218,000,000 matches
  • “occassion” — spelled incorrectly as O-C-C-A-S-S-I-O-N — 3,340,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have favored the correct spelling over the incorrect spelling by a ratio of 65.3-to-1, which is very good but not excellent, given the more than three million incorrect spellings.

Correctly spelling the noun “Occasion” fixes only the first problem. When an adjective plus a noun modify another noun, the adjective and first noun must be joined with a hyphen to form the modifier of the second noun.

So the adjective “Any” plus the first noun “Occasion” must be joined with a hyphen to form the modifier of the second noun “Top”.

Solution:
“Any-Occasion Top”