Propriety and Decency on Primetime Television, My A**!

Given that every shit, crap, bitch, bastard, ass, pimp, whore, hooker and f--k in print and in spoken dialogue is unerringly beeped out, blanked out, starred and what have you, this slip - an inappropriate, indecent, no-no word (by our television censors' standards) in plain sight, not once but at least 25 times, in the subtitles of a prime time show on Indian television has to have been the most mortifying yet! Or let's say it should have been so for the zealous guardians of our decency!

A staple diet of a series of English language shows on Star World between 9 and 11 pm has me plonked in front of the television every night. I read the subtitles because try as I might they cannot be ignored and because the shows themselves are fairly inane and predictable. Their predictability is vaguely comforting though - it allows me to watch them in a half conscious, lazy-hazy way between sitting, slouching, lying down, eating, drinking, talking, phoning, reading, working..... whatever.

But on the night of August 8, I suddenly sat bolt upright and stayed that way till the end of One Tree Hill, a soap about a small obscure town somewhere in America...... at first I couldn't believe I was reading a subtitle which contained the word 'gonad' ...... it's got to be a slip, I told myself..... but no, a few seconds later there it was again.....and again......and again......and again....and yet again, gonad, gonad, gonad, gonad, gonad, every single time the actor in the frame said 'gonna' as in 'going to'! What the hell was going on? My first thought: Were the caretakers of our morals on a holiday or what? My second one: Does the subtitler (or whatever he is called) have a hearing impairment?

To save you the trouble of checking out 'gonad' in a dictionary, it means a testicle or an ovary .....okay if you don't believe me here is the Wikipedia meaning - The gonad is the organ that makes gametes. The gonads in males are the testes, and the gonads in females are the ovaries. The urban dictionary website at http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=gonads calls gonads balls, jewels, nuts, etc. Ha ha ha.... it gets funnier - the urban dictionary website gives an example of how the word 'gonads' is used in slang. Here it is, "my ex-wife kicked me in the gonads"!

Now I wonder what exactly possessed the subtitler to zero in on this word to use, not once but multiple times. It does not sound even remotely like 'gonna' for God's sake. It is pronounced go-nad (as in pad). It is not a commonly known or used word. (The only reason I know it is because like all enthusiastic Scrabblers I know this and other weird, little known words that help me to unload my seven letter tiles before my opponent unloads his.) Was this esteemed guardian of our morality trying to embarrass his boss or the channel? Was it sabotage? Or was he just a good Scrabbler having some harmless fun?

Methinks this subtitler was doing none of the above.......if he was he would have to know the meaning of the word, and if he knew the meaning it would take some nerve to do what he did or a great sense of humour! Both of which I don't somehow think he has! Methinks he knows the word 'gonad' but not its meaning (bad Scrabbler), that he is a fool, that he does not care to check the meaning even out of curiosity if not in the quest for excellence, and that there is no one who proof reads/edits what goes up on the television screen! And if there is anyone who argues that 'gonad' is okay then why not penis, dick, prick, tool, etc etc etc (all of which we know are religiously beeped out), especially if these words are used to correctly transcribe the spoken dialogue ?!!!! Just a thought to chew on.... ha ha ha!

On a more serious note, this slip would actually be really, really hilarious if it wasn't a reflection of the ignorance, mediocrity and complete lack of accountability of this subtitler and for that matter the whole tribe of proof readers/editors, whether on Indian channels or on the prestigious BBC, in filmi rags and tabloids or in snotty intellectual journals like the Economic and Political Weekly! This is not about being corrupted by indecent words. This is not about morals and propriety. It is about realizing that it is time to sit up and start noting the errors in spelling, syntax, and usage of language. It is about beginning to feel ashamed of the 'chalta hai' attitude in print and broadcast journalism and frankly in just about everything else!   

Amazing Bostonspeak

I have been wanting to write this ever since I returned from Boston. Yes, the Boston of the Boston Tea Party fame among other things. Read on for one of these 'other things' this beautiful historical city is famous for.......!

It was a hot, in fact a very hot day by May standards in Boston, so we decided to take the trolley tour of the city. Th best thing we did - we not only got to see this historic city in the most comfortable way possible that day, but also got to hear about three hours or so of continuous Bostonspeak, thanks to our very entertaining trolley driver - not to take away from his expertise, but we were kept engaged as much by his knowledge of the city and his enthusiasm, as by - yes you guessed it right, his Bostonspeak!

From the moment the tour started our very voluble driver cum tour guide had all of us non-Bostonians on the trolley looking at each other with wonder and amusement at the way he said words like  park - almost like pack rather than paaark, to give you the simplest example of how Bostonians cannot say the sound of the r-controlled vowel 'ar'.

We found ourselves waiting almost with bated breath for his next utterance of this extraordinary Boston way of pronouncing this vowel! He finally caught on to what was happening behind him via his rear view mirror and pronounced "Yeah, I  know, you are all wondering if Bostonians do not have the letter R in their alphabet, right?" There was a roar of laughter all down the trolley at the way he had pronounced R like in 'arrow'!

Now far from laughing at this feature of Bostonians' English, I think they are probably the most consistent or the most logical of all Americans.....!!!

Find out why in my blog entry

American English - the logic of it????

The SMS impact

There was time a few years ago when an email from a young friend that went "How R U? BTW, I'm going to B in the US in May and wud very much like 2 meet U" surprised me because I had just about begun to accept this kind of murder of the English language in text messages. In fact I'd only just started committing murder myself in the interest of time and brevity when texting. How long would it be before my murderous instincts found expression in the realm of email?

I distinctly remember the first time a young cousin with whom I was chatting online used LOL, and for the life of me I could not figure what that might mean despite trying all the reading comprehension strategies I taught my students to use, namely, go back and read, look for context clues, etc. etc. Finally I interrupted our cyber conversation by asking my cousin what LOL meant. I must confess I felt extremely stupid and enlightened that day! Needless to say my SMS type vocabulary has grown enormously since then, but happily I still email in English!

The fact is that IM (Instant Messaging) or SMS conventions represent a new and important form of literacy, which involves decoding, encoding, interpretation and analysis. As Lewis, C. & Fabos (2005) point out IM blurs the boundaries of literacy, and redefines literacy as a "range of practices involved in the alphabetic coding of socially and culturally relevant signs and symbols", in their article "Instant Messaging, Literacies and Social Identities" in the Reading Research Quarterly, 40, 470-501.

So if IM constitutes a new form of literacy what implications would this have for the study of linguistics? Will some of these abbreviations like LOL for instance become word acronyms or morphemes to be pronounced as ordinary words? We already write this abbreviation in lower-case letters ( lol) as happens with acronyming (a way of getting new words), don't we? Will dictionaries   include lol and represent it in phonetic writing so that it will be pronounced like a word in itself? And how will it be phonetically transcribed? Will it be transcribed as lol as in lazing or will it be lol as rhyming with dole? If it is the former, then we would describe a person who was laughing out loud while lazing in a reclining posture as a person who was lolling and lolling! Too complicated? Forget it and pray it doesn't happen!

And what about those abbreviations, like BTW, which cannot be pronounced as words (on account of the rules that govern which sounds may or may not be combined in English)? Will they begin to be read and pronounced as a sequence of letters, and replace the phrase "by the way" altogether? In other words will BTW become a morpheme in its own right?

Chew on that and check a dictionary for BTW and LOL while you are at it. Until then tc ....

  

A Case for Indexical/Iconic Linguistic Signs!

I remember the time when one of my kindergarten students was reading aloud the story of Little Red Riding Hood. She read the following lines, "Oh Grandmother," said Little Red Riding Hood, "what big ears you have!" "The better to hear you with, my dear," said the wolf.  "Oh Grandmother, what big eyes you have!" said Red Riding Hood. "The better to see you with , my dear," said the wolf. " "Oh Grandmother, what big teeth you have!" said Red Riding Hood. "The better to EAT you with!" snapped the wolf...."


Five-year-old Natalie read all of these lines fluently, in an even voice, raising it slightly and quite appropriately at the exclamation marks.


But when she came to the word "EAT" in large, big case letters, she made her voice substantially louder. She had obviously responded to the visual stimulus of the big size of the letters, and correctly interpreted their size to represent the big, loud and scary voice of the wolf dressed as her grandmother in the story. Natalie had used this change of voice spontaneously, without any instruction or modeled reading from myself, since I had never read this particular version of the story to her.


Linguistic signs or morphemes are symbolic in nature. They are not indexical or iconic. That is as it should be. For if they were indexical/iconic then the number name "one" would not be the same length as the number name "two", and the word "big" would always be written as BIG, and the word "small" as small. And this would be maddening and quite impossible for how would the word "invisible" or "would' or "shall" be represented for instance? And so there is a very strong case for symbolically represented linguistic signs!


But equally, there is a case to be made for using indexical/iconic representation for certain words in children's literature. Going by Natalie's spontaneous voice amplification in reading the word "EAT", indexical/iconic representation is obviously effective in aiding fluent, expressive reading and comprehension.


Authors of children's books and especially of books for beginning readers would do well to keep this in mind and use the strategy of representing certain words indexically or iconically wherever possible, like when beginning a story with "A loooooong, loooooooong  time ago, ....................."!


    

Iconic/Indexical Representation

The season of awards is upon us. The Grammies, the Baftas, the Apsara Awards, and a score of others. In this connection I resurrected a piece from the New York Times that had caught my eye several years ago. It consisted of words used in acceptance speeches at the previous six Academy Awards ceremonies. The more often a word had been used in these acceptance speeches, the larger was its depiction in this article.

Any guesses as to which word was the largest in size? Scroll down to check!

Not surprisingly the word  thank was the largest in size and iconic/indexical in its representation, where otherwise it would have had a purely symbolic (represented by the letters that make up its spelling) representation.   

American English - the logic of it????

I was watching superstar Madhuri Dixit on television the other day and among the things that struck me other than her wholesome beauty and her million watt smile was her new American drawl. Listening to her speak helped vindicate my observation that perhaps the first casualty in the dilution of one's accent (especially if influenced by British English pronunciation), and in the acquisition of the American accent is the dropping of the sound of 'ah' in words such as blast, past, fast, etc., and its replacement by the short vowel sound of the letter 'a' (as in cat) instead.


When I first arrived in the US and began to teach a mixed Preprimary Montessori class of 3, 4, and 5-year-olds, I found that often my little students did not follow my Indian accent with its British English influenced pronunciation, especially during read aloud time. Words like last, fast, after, mask, etc., in which I pronounced the grapheme/letter 'a' with the 'ah' sound of the low back unrounded vowel, but which are pronounced with the low front vowel sound (the short vowel sound of the grapheme 'a') in American English, were the main problem. I found myself quickly adopting the low front vowel of the American pronunciation of this vowel sound in these and other such words in my speech, in the interest of being more effective in the classroom.


I began to wonder when and why the Americans first started to use the low front vowel sound for the grapheme 'a' in place of the low back unrounded vowel to pronounce words like the ones mentioned above.


Could it be that, being a melting pot of races from the day the nation was born, it was imperative to adopt a common language that was as easy as possible for everyone to read and write? Had this led to a stress on making reading and spelling phonetic, logical  and rule bound? By that logic therefore, if the grapheme 'a' is pronounced with the short 'a' vowel sound in words like can, man, fat, mat, bag, gas, etc., then the same pronunciation of the vowel 'a' should apply in words like mask, fast, last, after, etc.


The adoption of the low front vowel sound of the grapheme 'a' in the pronunciation of the examples given earlier, as the result of a larger, conscious decision by the country's earliest academicians/intellectuals/founding fathers/educators, for the purpose of bringing speech, reading and writing as much in line with each other as possible seems far fetched and absurd even to me, the propounder of this theory. To accept this crazy theory would mean that you believe that the earliest colonists from the present day UK  arrived in the present day US with an English English accent, and after successfully colonizing the new country and imposing their language on it, consciously changed the language in the process of forging a new political and linguistic identity. Further, my somewhat absurd theory does not hold in the case of words like car, jar, star, mar, stark, mark, marsh, etc., which contain the R-controlled vowel 'ar' and which retain the British English low back unrounded vowel sound of 'ah'.


However, there is a justification of my tentative theory in the case of American English spelling in words like color and honor, albeit in the reverse direction, namely, that the British English pronunciation has been retained, but the spelling has been made phonetic.

Absurd as my hypothesis might seem, there has to have been some reason for changing the rules for spelling, other than simply a desire to be different. This same reason would then apply to pronunciation, don't you think? And the fact is the English colonists were imposing their language on a motley lot of emigres so they had to find a way to make their crazy language of more exceptions and less rules easy to learn to read and write.


Then again, as asserted by Hudson (2000), language change takes place in speech communitites that are removed from the linguistc standards of the broader community, by geography or geographical features, like wide bodies of water or mountain ranges. This may explain the divergence of American and British English as early as in colonial times. Thus, the transformation of the low back unrounded vowel sound of the letter 'a' into the low front vowel sound of this letter in American English in words like last and fast, is probably just an accident in the evolutionary process of a language after all!