Laura’s blog

I was thinking today about idioms that get botched by accident or by people without native knowledge of English.  I started to think about it after hearing one of the girls in the choir singing a solo on a piece called "Something to Talk About" which was originally performed by Bonny Raitt.  She was performing in the women's a capella group Paws and Listen.  Anyway, at some point in the song, the narrator is talking about keeping her relationship/ interest in her good friend "under cover".  The soloist, who I believe was singing in place of another girl who was sick, said "under covers".  To me, the use of under covers completely changed the meaning of the song.  It gave it a little too much sexual innuendo to keep the tune wholesome.  They were singing the song in a church... but that's another matter entirely.

Anyway, it makes a big difference if you mess up idioms!  Especially as a native speaker.  I came across a cute little website about a man whose wife seems to always get confused about when to use idioms in English: http://luminouslogic.com/foreign-wife-isms.htm.  I think she has an excuse, but it just goes to show how difficult idioms can be to master.  And as I saw in Paws and Listen, even native speakers can become confused!

I was thinking today about idioms that get botched by accident or by people without native knowledge of English.  I started to think about it after hearing one of the girls in the choir singing a solo on a piece called "Something to Talk About" which was originally performed by Bonny Raitt.  She was performing in the women's a capella group Paws and Listen.  Anyway, at some point in the song, the narrator is talking about keeping her relationship/ interest in her good friend "under cover".  The soloist, who I believe was singing in place of another girl who was sick, said "under covers".  To me, the use of under covers completely changed the meaning of the song.  It gave it a little too much sexual innuendo to keep the tune wholesome.  They were singing the song in a church... but that's another matter entirely.

Anyway, it makes a big difference if you mess up idioms!  Especially as a native speaker.  I came across a cute little website about a man whose wife seems to always get confused about when to use idioms in English: http://luminouslogic.com/foreign-wife-isms.htm.  I think she has an excuse, but it just goes to show how difficult idioms can be to master.  And as I saw in Paws and Listen, even native speakers can become confused!

I am currently on a University of Kentucky Women's Choir trip in Wisconsin.  Last night we spent the night with home stay families in Appleton, Wisconsin apparently like they used to do when Christian-affiliated choirs would tour the country.  The rest of the trip we've been staying in hotels.

Anyway, my friend Laura and I were paired with a single woman named Sandra.  She looked to be in her mid-forties, and she was very hospitable and kind.  But I couldn't help but get the feeling she didn't respond well and/or use positive politeness.  At one point I was asking her about growing up in South Dakota (I knew it was one of those Dakotas and I sure hoped it was South).  Without missing a beat, she said that it was North Dakota.  She didn't seem angry or put-off, but the way she corrected me without inserting "everyone makes that mistakes" or "don't worry, dear" or something along those lines.  I realized that I like positive politeness!  I want it!  It makes me feel more comfortable!  So that was a big breakthrough for me.

I noticed throughout the home stay that our host seemed to respond better to my friend Laura, perhaps because they have a similar manner.  My experiences made me see how important politeness can really be in daily interactions. 

I saw her duck. 

What is your first reaction to this sentence?  Duck is ambiguous!  It could be the verb duck or the noun duck.  Without context, how can we tell?  Do you think a difference in voice emphasis would clear it up?  Or do you have to have context?  Let me know what you think.

Oh, the parts of language that confuses us...

Sorry if I'm beating a dead horse, but I can't help but complain about the confusion of temporal deixis I've been having lately.  Time is running out in my last semester at UK, and events are coming up left and right designed to "say goodbye", etc.  I really want to go to the Kentucky Derby for the first time, but I got this pesky invitation to hang out with a bunch of my old dorm friends "the Saturday before we graduate".  I graduate on May 4, which is a Sunday and the Derby is the day before that.  So it begs the question: which Saturday before graduation?  The day before graduation, or the weekend before the weekend of graduation.  The frustration continues...

The following example was taken from a website pointing out linguistic elements that make up the jokes on the Simpson's (see http://heideas.blogspot.com/2008/03/beyond-beyond-beyond-beyond-embiggens.html for the full blog):

Episode: Funeral for a Fiend (2007)

Category:Idiom chunks, degree phrase

Sideshow Bob's psychiatic expert witness is giving evidence that SB was insane during his most recent attempt on the Simpsons' lives:

Psychiatrist: Robert was a peaceful boy, sickly and weak from a congenital heart defect. [He shows a picture of SB going to his prom in bed. The jury goes "Awwww!"] But then that Simpson boy started tormenting him, and he crossed over into dementia!
Sideshow Bob (defending himself): To what degree was this dementia blown?
Psychiatrist: Full! [Jury gasps.]

Here you can see how you have to have a particular knowledge of the English language to understand the joke in this example, which is appealing to our knowledge of the idiomatic phrase/concept "full blown".  If we didn't have the linguistic knowledge to connect blown and full, we wouldn't get the joke!  Pretty cool, huh?

The other day I had an embarrassing moment in which everyone thought I was violating Grice's maxim of relation.  And as it turned out, I was. 

As part of the Asia Center's Symposium on the environment last week, a Chinese guy came to talk to us about his involvement in Greenpeace.  He lived in China up until a year ago when he came here to go to graduate school at American University in Washington, D.C.  He was telling us all this and how after he graduated high school he worked for three years at Wendy's (pay attention to this part).  As soon as he said that, I started wondering why on earth someone involved with Greenpeace would work at Wendy's, and I continued to think about that throughout the discussion.

Since it was a small group, I felt inclined to ask him a casual question toward the end just to break up the formality of the discussion up to that point.  I thought it might be funny to inquire about his job at Wendy's so I asked, "So do you ever eat at Wendy's anymore, or do you hate going there?"

As soon as I asked I knew I had said something weird.  The speaker gave me a strange questioning look, and the 4 other people there fell into an awkward silence.  Oh no!  Had I said something culturally offensive?  Didn't he say he'd worked at Wendy's?

It took several minutes of flustered questions from me to figure out he had never said he'd worked at Wendy's.  They don't even have Wendy's in China.  He'd said Greenpeace.  But it just goes to show how much saying something completely irrelevant in a conversation leads to confusion.  Grice wasn't kidding! 

Moral of this story: be relevant

The "this weekend" issue is another that I struggle with so often that I was immediately interested in the subject of temporal deixis.  I find myself spending a considerable amount of my life trying to clarify whether I mean the weekend that has just passed, the weekend coming up, or a particular weekend in the future (which is the option that would have to involve some kind of gesture toward the direction of a calendar or planner).  Why is it that there is no universal rule in place to solve this problem?  Think of all the conversation time we could save if we were taught as children to say this weekend to mean the coming weekend after a particular point in the week. 

Until then, we will continue to fumble through our confusing interactions!

When we were talking about social deixis in class on Tuesday, I kept thinking about the dilemma I have every time I need to send an email to a professor, especially one I don't know.  I have difficulty figuring out what title to use to address them, and I often find myself dorkily searching UK's website to try to figure out whether they have a doctorate so I can use Dr. in front of their names.  When it's a female professor and she doesn't seem to have a doctorate, Ms. always seems inappropriate but it is sometimes the only option!  Hmph.  Luckily, after I have sent the initial email the professor will typically clear up how they want to be addressed, and that works in my favor.  Although, Dr. Stump always signs his emails Greg and somehow I just can't address him as such.  Haha.

When an ambiguous word is spoken in a context in which it could mean a number of things, is there not typically an answer that seems more default, more frequent, or even... more prototypical?  I was thinking of this this evening (I am writing this while there is a raucous party going on at my house and I just realized I hadn't written my entries... whoops...) when my party guests were enjoying the slang flashcards my boyfriend gave me for my birthday a while ago.  They include slang words such as wangsta, to' up, homes, dank, and whip.  I was taking pictures of people holding up the cards and acting out what they saw written. 

Two of my friends picked up the card for whip which in slang means (according to Urban dictionary):

whip
	n. 1. A fast, expensive car, such as an Aston Martin. Sometimes used to describe vehicles of a lesser extent in areas of lower standards. Check the new whip, thug! I dropped 300 G's on this V12, now I'm ballin' like James Bond

Instead of going by the definition of the card, they interpreted it as a whip that might be used in a sadomasochist sexual act, and one pretended to whip the other.  Why do you think that they chose this interpretation over the slang version offered or, for example, the majority whip in congress?  I would argue that some definitions of a word are more common and arguably prototypical.  What do you guys think?