"a time to put aside politeness"

Fascinating Guardian piece about linguistic differences between the freedom fighters of Ukraine and Putin's unwanted invaders, especially when it comes to swearing:

"Ukraine’s move away from Soviet-style linguistic prissiness does two things. First, it makes the obvious point that war is serious, a time to put aside politeness. Second, it emphasises the gulf between the communication strategies of the autocratic Putin and the self-consciously democratic, media-savvy Zelenskiy. The Ukrainian president and his team have shown their mastery – even in siege conditions – of the idioms of social media, of the way it blends homemade and professional, public and private. The language of Zelenskiy’s public persona reinforces this sense of familiarity: in a 3 March press conference, he addressed Putin directly, in Russian, using the informal 'ty' form of address: 'I’m an ordinary guy, sit down with me, I don’t bite.'

This informality, which is also evident in the military-casual attire of Zelenskiy and the Ukrainian delegation at the peace talks, is a deliberate contrast to Putin’s presentation which, especially on the eve of the war, juxtaposed banality and absurdity with its long tables, rants about history and ever-present technocratic suit and tie. I’ve seen the talking heads of Russian state TV express contempt for the Ukrainians’ alleged lack of professionalism but the fact that, by 9 March, Putin felt obliged to come out of isolation to address a rally, and to do so in a polo neck and (expensive, Italian) puffa jacket made the failings of Russia’s plan A pretty evident."

If you're engaged in Tone Policing, you're probably the asshole to begin with. 

"perfect language swap"

Where does right-wing extremism come from, and why are so many ostensibly "liberal" people falling for it?  George Monbiot takes a stab:

"I believe this synthesis of left-alternative and rightwing cultures has been accelerated by despondency, confusion and betrayal. After left-ish political parties fell into line with corporate power, the right seized the language they had abandoned. Steve Bannon and Dominic Cummings brilliantly repurposed the leftwing themes of resisting elite power and regaining control of our lives. Now there has been an almost perfect language swap. Parties that once belonged on the left talk about security and stability while those on the right talk of liberation and revolt.

But I suspect it also has something to do with the issues we now face. A justified suspicion about the self-interest of big pharma clashes with the need for mass vaccination. The lockdowns and other measures required to prevent Covid-19 spreading are policies which, in other circumstances, would rightly be seen as coercive political control. Curtailing the pandemic, climate breakdown and the collapse of biodiversity means powerful agreements struck between governments – which can be hard to swallow for movements that have long fought multilateral power while emphasising the local and the homespun."

"the tar tar pits"

Polyglot tautologies, where you name something for what is already is, are amazing:

"The River Avon, running through Shakespeare’s hometown Stratford-Upon-Avon, is another example. 'Avon' in an ancient Celtic language means 'river' – so the River Avon is more properly the River River. The La Brea Tar Pits manage to be redundant in two ways: La Brea is Spanish for 'the tar' – so the La Brea Tar Pits effectively mean 'the the tar tar pits.'"

Wiki has a handy list of them. 

Self Improvement

plan was to study Korean a few hours a week once I got back to US.

hours of Korean actually studied so far since 2.1.2021:

0

— James (@wetcasements) March 17, 2021

"scooby snack jurassic plastic gas booby trap"

I'd like to think I'm the only person in Whatcom County who walked 5 km this morning listen to @GhostfaceKillah 's _Supreme Clientele_.

If not, we should meet behind the Nugent's Corner grocery store.

— James (@wetcasements) March 9, 2021

"in a dense fog / still playing"

Rest in peace Lawrence Ferlinghetti, having reached the age of 101 (!).  Due to the talent and kindness of two teachers in high school, you were the first poet I ever took seriously, whose words I tried to inhabit.  (If he'd never written a word and only published Howl we'd still owe him a lot.)

From "Autobiography":

"I am a bank of song.

I am a playerpiano

in an abandoned casino

on a seaside esplanade

in a dense fog

still playing.

I see a similarity

between the Laughing Woman

and myself.

I have heard the sound of summer

in the rain.

I have seen girls on boardwalks

have complicated sensations.

I understand their hesitations.

I am a gatherer of fruit.

I have seen how kisses

cause euphoria.

I have risked enchantment.

I have seen the Virgin

in an appletree at Chartres

and Saint Joan burn

at the Bella Union.

I have seen giraffes in junglejims

their necks like love

wound around the iron circumstances

of the world."

"continuous conceptual drunkenness"

"But no.  That was analogy rather than homology.  What in the humanities they would call a heroic simile, if he understood the term, or a metaphor, or some other kind of literary analogy.  And analogies were mostly meaningless -- a matter of phenotype rather than genotype (to use another analogy).  Most of poetry and literature, really all the humanities, not to mention the social sciences, were phenotypic as far as Sax could tell.  They added up to a huge compendium of meaningless analogies, which did not help to explain things, but only distorted perception of them.  A kind of continuous conceptual drunkenness, one might say.  Sax himself much preferred exactitude and explanatory power, and why not?  If it was 200 Kelvin outside why not say so, rather than talk about witches' tits and the like, hauling the whole great baggage of the ignorant past along to obscure every encounter with sensory reality?  It was absurd."

-- Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

Found In Translation

My life is way too up in the air right now to do something as life-changing as buying a new video game console, but this is kind of cool -- the Hangul-ized logo for Cyberpunk 2077.  (I realize the release has been a shit-show.)

So roughly, we've got "SA-EEE-BUH-PUNG-KU."

Not easy to do, but very cool.

King Sejong Was A Pimp

And a happy Hangul Day to you.

The weather here in Daegu is autumn perfection.  Off to take a long walk around the north part of the city.

"My Juliet is the sun: in what sense?"

"Now, consequently, as a result, we are getting somewhere.

This last phrase is a metaphor, it is said, in which increasing conceptual understanding is seen as a movement through space.

Much of human language is said to be fundamentally metaphorical.  This is not good news.  Metaphor, according to Aristotle, is an intuitive perception of a similarity in dissimilar things.  However, what is a similarity?  My Juliet is the sun: in what sense?

A quick literature review suggests the similarities in metaphors are arbitrary, even random.  They could be called metaphorical similarities, but no AI likes tautological formulations, because the halting problem can be severe, become a so-called Ouroboros problem, or a whirlpool with no escape: aha, a metaphor.  Bringing together the two parts of a metaphor, called the vehicle and the tenor, is said to create a surprise.  Which is not surprising: young girls like flowers?  Waiters in a restaurant like planets orbiting Sol?

Tempting to abandon metaphor as slapdash nonsense, but again, it is often asserted in linguistic studies that all human language is inherently and fundamentally metaphorical.  Most abstract concepts are said to be made comprehensible, or even conceivable in the first place, by way of concrete physical referents.  Human thought ultimately always sensory, experiential, etc.  If this is true, abandoning metaphor is contraindicated.

Possibly an algorithm to create metaphors by yoking vehicles to tenors could employ the semiotic operations used in music to create variations on themes: thus, inversion, retrogradation, retrograde inversion, augmentation, diminution, partition, interversion, exclusion, inclusion, textural change.

Can try it and see."

-- Kim Stanley Robinson, Aurora

Tele-Teaching

It's been a day.

Me and foreign co-worker got a crash course in distance learning.  My college has gotten what seems to be a pretty stable and decent on-line program going, and for the next few weeks (at least two) we'll be voice recording our lectures and putting them up with small quizzes for the students to, ahem, enjoy.

I have my doubts, especially for a beginner level language course.  I always do.  But it's nice to feel a little bit useful after an unexpected month off.

I'm just trying to stay positive about everything.  I found out that a church choir about 20 minutes south from where my Dad lives got rocked with the coronavirus, including multiple deaths.

Stay home as much as possible.  Wash those hands.  No trips to make-out city for you.

I'm strangely exhausted, considering I didn't do that much other than listen to my boss.  But being taken out of my teaching comfort-zone probably has something to do with it.

"adjusting to each other’s lagom, while using nunchi"

An interview with the Swedish ambassador to South Korea, and the similarities between the two cultures:

"Lagom, a way of striving for balance, is a concept that many Swedes apply in their daily lives without even thinking about it - it could be during their dinner conversations, in the way they consume and design products or even in the way of diplomacy.

'Not the middle. Not average. Not complacency. Just right,” wrote Lola Akinmade Akerstrom in her book, 'Lagom: The Swedish Secret of Living Well' (2017).

Nunchi is the Korean art of listening to and gauging other people in social settings that makes one a master of unspoken communications.

Korea and Sweden celebrated 60 years of their diplomatic ties this year. The ties have never been stronger, Hallgren said, and that may be attributed to the fact that many Koreans and Swedes grow up adjusting to each other’s lagom, while using nunchi."

My Korean adult students told me that nunchi is usually a good thing, but can also be a passive, shut-up when elders or seniors are talking, thing.

An Alphabet For Everyone?

The creation and history of hangul, the Korean alphabet, is fascinating in and of itself ("among the most phonologically faithful writing systems in use today").  It gets better (worse?) when it comes to modern intrigue surrounding existing artifacts of its creation:

"The Cultural Heritage Administration (CHA) can finally raid the home of Bae Ik-gi, the man who has held and concealed the nationally treasured document 'Huminjeongeum' for the past 11 years. On July 11, The Supreme Court dismissed Bae’s appeal asking the court to stop the CHA from carrying out a forcible extraction. In short, the Supreme Court ultimately ruled that the ownership rights of the Haerye segment of the 'Hunminjeongeum,' which Bae has been hiding, belong to the administration, giving the CHA the green light to take the 'Hunminjeongeum' from Bae by force.

But, the organization is pessimistic that Bae will hand over the 'Hunminjeongeum' despite court’s ruling."

It's a priceless artifact, and its authenticity has been verified.  But the story around this copy of the manuscript is straight out of a Nic Cage movie.

It's also worth noting that Koreans are a bit more sensitive to these issues since so many other national treasures were stolen during the Japanese occupation.

Safe Spaces Indeed

Can we now please dispense with the notion that conservatives lamenting the end of free speech are principled Philosopher-Kings?

In fact, they're privileged assholes who want to ensure they are never criticized or mocked by people less famous and wealthy than they are?

Or that the Oberlin Student Council carries the same weight as Fox News?

"eat that steak"

Korean millenials face many of the same challenges that American ones do -- a sluggish job market (for full time work, at least), increasing costs for education and housing, and more generally a sense that they'll never do as well as their parents did.  So are they overlooked and under appreciated, or just wasteful spenders?  Enter "fuck-it expenses":

"Loosely translated to 'fuck-it expense,' the term is a compound noun combining shibal (a swearword for frustration) and biyong (expense). It first appeared in late 2016, with the earliest tweet about it referring to 'an expense that I would not have spent if I weren’t under stress,' such as 'an impulsive food delivery or a cab ride.' The post caught on, and the term was named “neologism of the year” by several South Korean media outlets.

A shibal biyong is an expense that might seem unnecessary but that helps you get through a bad day. It’s the $20 you splurge for a cab home instead of taking the subway after you’ve been denied a promotion or the comforting but expensive sushi you buy after you’ve been berated by your boss. The term implies that you might as well make yourself happy right now because your prospects in the long term seem bleak. Buy that nice coat, because you’ll never get on the housing ladder. Eat that steak, because you’ll never save up enough to retire."

Meanwhile the Korean demographic crisis continues unabated.

Tears of a Pierrot

Korean language fun fact: one word for "clown" in Korean is "pi-e-ro," as in Pierrot.  There are words for juggler and acrobat that are similar, but if you've got a crazy rainbow wig and big red shoes Koreans will generally use this borrowed word.

Update:  A friend living in Japan on Twitter let me know that Japanese uses the same loan word.

Who Gets To Be "Lucky"?

What's in a name?  For a few newly opened Chinese restaurants run by non-Chinese chefs, a fair amount of drama, if not outright problematic thinking:

"However, by the mid-20th century, changing conditions in both countries saw a shift. When Mao Zedong and his People’s Republic of China party took power in 1949, the country was declared an atheist state; as part of the Cultural Revolution he led, social values were upended, ancient religions were banned, and traditional Chinese pictographic characters were simplified to fewer strokes. Meanwhile, in the U.S., Jung writes that 'as non-Chinese customers became better acquainted with Chinese names and more tolerant toward Chinese culture, it became fashionable after 1950 to return to Chinese names.'

That leaves the 'lucky' name with a smack of old-timeyness, but there are still plenty of them — American-Chinese restaurants often don’t change names when a new owner takes over, for consistency’s sake. In other cases, restaurant owners might lean in on the 'lucky' name to intentionally create a sense of nostalgia; many of the new restaurants from non-Chinese owners employ it alongside a cheeky, retro feel to their decor and branding. Think old-fashioned poster art or cigarette labels with women in Mandarin dresses, old Chinese newspapers, or Tiki bar aesthetics. Nostalgia is a big ticket in U.S. restaurants today: It’s the secret sauce in everything from dishes to decor to cocktails at such esteemed restaurants as the Grill and Rocco Dispirito’s new Standard Grill, both in New York."

I've always like Andrew Zimmern on T.V., so I was bummed that he was such a dick-head regarding his new (and apparently not very good) Asian restaurant.

Doolittle

Having a tough time of it?  Don't "correct" yer accent, soften it:

"A broad regional accent might hold you in good stead in some jobs, but can be a drawback in more upwardly mobile careers. 'There may be some kind of expectation that, if you’ve secured a good degree and aced teacher training, then why didn’t you modify your accent as a linguistic means to signal that you are moving up in the world,' says Dr Alex Baratta, a lecturer at the Manchester Institute of Education.

'Accents tell you as much about what we project on to people as anything to do with the actual people,' says Sophie Scott, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London. How you perceive accents can be dependent on your proximity to the location of the accent, she says. She grew up in Blackburn, Lancashire, where the Liverpudlian accent was considered 'metropolitan'. This contrasts with the animus that some Mancunians have towards a scouse accent, and the romanticism some Americans hear in its cadences.

Since I have been in London, I have become conscious of what my accent signals – northerners are often depicted as being louts or simpletons in the southern-centric media. During the first few ice-breakers at university, I was told by a well-spoken southerner that I sounded like Karl Pilkington, of An Idiot Abroad fame.

My adult students explained to me that a Daegu accent doesn't map as "stupid" or "poor" so much as "antagonistic" towards Seoul folks.

Make of that what you will.

Jung Ones

.@jordanbpeterson is the Theory, Dimitrios Pagourtzis, Marc Lepine, Elliot Rodger, Alek Minsassian, George Sodini are the Practice

— Stormy Jamesiels (@wetcasements) May 24, 2018

This Is Why They Pay Me The Big Bucks

Passive voice was taught today.