idioms, idiolects, idolatry?

My Advanced Topics in Syntactic Theories class only has two students in it: me and much-deserving-of-sympathy C L-G. C L-G is the kind of guy who will go WAY out of his way to follow up on a ridiculous pun. For example, one time we were giggling about a silly joke from the internet. The joke was about inappropriate innuendo and the phrase "nut-dust". A week later, I got a text message. C L-G was coming over to give me something. So what happened? C L-G showed up in the lab with a plastic cup full of peanut dust! Just for me.

So, he's my favorite. This makes it a fun and funny class. There are other reasons that it is a fun and funny class too. And guess what! I will tell you about those reasons!

For one thing, the class is held not in the cozy old Linguistics Department building, but in a fancy new technotastic room which is set up for all kinds of sophisticated technology-assisted learning. In particular, a lot of cameras in the walls record our every comment and then the whole thing gets uploaded to a website so we can rewind and rewatch the lectures. Like for example if we were too busy drawing cartoons on our homework assignment to catch what somebody just said. This means that every time anybody wants to say anything we have to press the button on the remote control which is velcroed to the table nearest our current position. That tells Big Brother which camera to go to. We can tell if we pushed the button hard enough by looking at one of many giant screens all over the room that show the current feed. It's like being the star of a really sedate movie that is all about Noam Chomsky and his Various Theories of Syntax. Five stars! Two thumbs up! The perfect movie for certain occasions.

So, okay. Yesterday we were all talking about Raising versus Control. This is an issue which I will not explain in detail unless I am asked, and we are at a bar, and I get to draw you diagrams on napkins, and you feign enthusiasm long past the point where you are really very sorry you brought it up. But anyway, it's an issue of linguistics and we were learning about it in class yesterday. Particularly we were learning about, how do you know if you're dealing with a Raising situation or a Control situation? It is very hard. You have to do tests on sentences.

One way that SOME people think you should figure it out is to start substituting idioms willy-nilly for whatever boring sentence you're talking about. This is not a way of which I approve. Apparently, some people have intuitions about acceptability that are much stricter than my own. This is why I will never be a syntactician; I am the lone speaker of an idiolect that is so full of annoying jokes that I don't know how I even have any friends.

Also, the result of any discussion that involves idioms and me is inevitably a lot of snickering on my part. You'd think my professors would know better by now and send me out of the room on some trumped-up errand. "Take this blank piece of paper to the Dean's Office! It's important!"

Here's what I wrote on my notes from yesterday:

The cat is out of the bag.
The cat seems to be out of the bag
The cat really wants to be out of the bag
That cat is ASKING to be out of the bag

Bob kicked the bucket
Bob seems to have kicked the bucket
Bob keeps trying to kick the bucket

The cat's out of the bucket.
Bob kicked the cat.
Bob bagged buckets of cats.
Well, the cat's out of the bucket and Bob won't stop kicking it.
Bob kicked the cat out of the bucket.
The cat kicked the bucket and now Bob's out of the bag.

Poor kitty.

I miss Vincent D'Onofrio

I spend way too many hours a day sitting around doing things on a computer, and not nearly enough hours a day watching Law & Order. It's very hard.

Currently I'm working on the presentation about genocide narrative I mentioned before (for GURT, are you going? come see me!).

Also I'm working on a fun project for VL2 that involves making movies. I'm designing elicitation materials and I love bossing people around so this has been a great way for me to spend time. "Okay now blow on the match, but don't blow it out. Okay now blow it out. Okay now put sugar in your tea. Taste it. More sugar!" The best part was the 20 minutes we spent filming attempts to throw crumpled-up paper into the wastebasket from various distances. Mostly because of all the people who walked past and raised their eyebrows at me in a meaningful and not-particularly-approving way. "Cecily NOW what are you doing? And why have you dragged these other people into it?" "It's linguistics, I swear! Okay now throw the blue paper, but miss on purpose, but not by too much."

Plus always the adorable two-year-old is fun. An endearing habit he has: responding to almost everything not patently false with a pause for consideration, then "yes, right."

him (pointing at a car): car!
me: yeah, it's a red car
him: (pause, serious look, smile) yes, right.


It's nice to have this kind of constant positive reinforcement.

tiny felt patriotism

My advisor's three-year-old daughter is all about the presidents. Specifically George Washington, with whom she is on a first-name basis. Also, she dresses up like him and goes to Mount Vernon for a treat.

And makes her mama play "sign the Declaration of Independence", a game in which players must sign as actual signers. Not, for example, Martha Washington, because did Martha Washington sign the actual declaration? No, my friends, she did not. Stop trying to rewrite history.

Anyway I offered to make a tiny felt animal of the child in question's choosing. The child in question requested George Washington, being uninterested in other nonpresidential animals. Although she was also interested in the horse. Whose name she knew and color she specified.

I like a challenge, so I went ahead and made Tiny Felt George Washington and his Tiny Felt Horse (whose name I forget. and the internet is not being helpful).

UPDATE: The horse's name is Nelson.








Then I made a flamingo for Lindsay. Because, no, actually, I do not have anything better to do, and please never ask me that ever again.

p. s. you want to hear a really hilarious joke about George Washington? Well you'll have to wait until you see me in person, because it is the kind of joke that requires face to face interaction. By which I mean, it is the kind of joke that I find so funny to tell, it doesn't even really matter if you think the punchline is funny, because I am laughing so hard by the time I get to it that you can't really understand it anyway.

“The great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever trees."

This must be a code name for WDC, because I can't think of any other explanations for why I have a fever so much of the time. Damn fever trees. Damn greasy river.

Anyway, I'm still sick. Deliveries of juice, tea, and soup are more than welcome.

"Space and time are the same"

this was a subtitle in a presentation I saw on Saturday. I like it.

I was in Pittsburgh at a conference all weekend, and now I have a fever. It is 100.7 at the moment. I don't like it.

election

For a while last month, Big Bear had a blackboard up, amidst all their menus and specials and Single Origin Coffees Made to Order Press Pot!s, which said:

Cuteness Primary
-Panda
-Polar
-Koala
-Stu*

Lana made people vote before she would let them have coffee, which if you ask me is a good way to increase turnout.

Meanwhile (and this is related, so please be patient with my narrative stylings), last Thanksgiving my mom had a new book and a new fun activity. The book was this:



and the fun activity was belly dancing.

Ha, ha. Just kidding! The fun activity was making tiny felt animals out of raw wool. Like these ones, which were made at my explicit command. I mean, my very politely-phrased request. (I'm not bossy! YOU'RE bossy! Leave me alone.)




Okay, so, clearly this is an adorable way to spend time. You take some fluff and then you stab it a lot with a felting needle. Felting needles look like normal needles, but be careful! They have barbs at the end and if you (for example) stabbed yourself in the thumb it would hurt a lot! And you would probably get blood all over your fleece project.

Now! Back to the cuteness primary and the fight about bears.** Because this all happened back in the days of January when I was spending all my time on the couch eating bon-bons, it occurred to me that I might contribute to the primary by way of making tiny felt mascots for each category. I only stabbed myself once and I didn't get any blood on them.









Verdict: adorable, but dangerous. Much like their real-life counterparts. (Except for Stu, who is not very dangerous unless you are allergic to whisky.)


Oh also, the winner: koala.




*Stu is not a bear, but he (I think) represented the cafe. Also, he is very cute, it is true.

**I am well aware that a koala is not a bear. I made this point several times, at varying volumes, but no one was impressed.

education

My sister and I often have conversations via changing the status messages of our IM programs. Usually they are conversations about linguistics homework (if I start it) or Science (if Jocelyn starts it).

Today:

Jocelyn: you can't see electrons without a machine.
Cecily: I can see electrons
Jocelyn: Then you must have a machine.
Cecily: I can see electrons with my eyes CLOSED!
Jocelyn: Those aren't electrons, those are your EYELIDS.

This made me laugh a lot.

Feedback

I spent the morning in a VL2 meeting. The setup was: the director standing with his presentation projected onto a screen, and then everyone else sitting at a bunch of tables arranged in a U shape. The interpreters were at the bottom of the U (opposite the director) with the hearing people bunched around them, and the deaf people at the ends of the U.

The room we were meeting in was not designed well for discussion in any modality, which made it interesting. There were stained glass windows and skylights and all kind of distracting lights and shadows going on on peoples' hands and faces. But also the acoustics seemed to be really bad, because none of the hearing people could hear any of the other hearing people talk unless they leaned way in right next to the speaker.

I think we're moving downstairs after this week.

Anyway meetings and presentations and such always make me hyper-self-conscious about whether or not I am doing feedback (backchanneling, to you linguistics types) correctly. Usually I am not. Interpreters are always coming up to me afterwards to find out what they did wrong or if I am mad at them or something. Deaf people do a lot of nodding and smiling and eyebrow raising when they're listening to other people. (Hearing people say "mhm, mhm" to accomplish the same thing, but I know how to do that right, more or less.)

Lindsay and I were talking about this last semester, because we were both taking consortium classes at Georgetown and it was weird. Normally, all of our academic discussions are either in ASL or on paper; I'm strangely unused to discussing linguistics in spoken English. Lindsay agreed with me about being used to talking about something in one langauge versus another, but she also said just the dynamic of what you are supposed to do as a lecture-goer was startling: she noticed after the first few classes that the professor seemed to be making eye contact with Lindsay way more than anyone else. She was nervous about why (do I have something in my teeth?!) until she realized that everyone else in the class was looking at their desk, taking notes and listening, and she was the only one who watched the professor consistently. "So I tried looking at my notes, but it felt really rude!" she said.

Our classes at Gallaudet are always conducted in ASL, and so everyone pays attention to whether or not people are looking at them. There's no point in making awesome and undeniably true arguments if your interlocutor can't see you. And also people are generally very aware of other visual competition; you have to wait for everybody to look at your powerpoint before you start talking, and when everybody rushes to write down the brilliant remark you just made, you have to give them time to look back up before starting again. In group discussions, people take turns.

For my Georgetown class, I had a CART reporter and voiced for myself, so I wasn't looking at the professor any more than anyone else, but there were a couple of other oddities I hadn't really anticipated. I had never used CART in a classroom before; usually (in my experience) a captioner is used for things like big meetings or performances or presentations, where there is little or no chance for audience participation, and for things like classes you get an interpreter. I requested CART because of the subject matter, but it was trickier than I thought it would be to have conversations with people where I would talk to them and then quick look at a computer screen when it was their turn.

It was also hard to remember if I was supposed to be talking or signing. A lot of how my subconscious decides what language/modality to use (and yours, too, I bet) is based on which one other people are using. It's automatic to respond to speech with speech or to sign with sign. Or to writing with writing. I didn't have any automatically easy choice in this setting, though (I didn't have a computer or I probably would have accidentally typed to everybody, imagining that they could somehow see my screen). Every time I wanted to make a comment or ask a question, I'd raise my hand and then panic for a second while figuring out what language to use.

Now I am back to all-ASL-all-the-time, so I only have to panic about whether I am about to say a joke that will earn dirty looks, or applause.

The other situation in which I frequently pick the wrong language is if I have been drinking a lot of beer. But that's for other reasons. The joke thing is always true.

Tangentially-related story: My brother hates regular relay and only likes video relay. This is true not because of speed or intonation or any of the normal reasons, but because with regular relay each person has to wait for the other one to say "go ahead" before talking, and, says my brother, "if you can't interrupt, how do you know who's winning?"

Me vs. Team Gallaudet: Episode XXIV

in which, anticlimactically, no tantrums are had and neither blood nor tears are shed.

Today was Business Registration Day again, my least favorite day of the semester and a day on which I generally end up either near (or in) tears or in a state of incoherent, trembling fury.

Today, though! Today was good! I spent half an hour in a line, and got my sticker, and was on my very merry way. I was next to an interpreting student friend in line and we small talked about whether or not she should have a costume party wedding celebration. (I voted yes.) Then I had extremely affable interactions with two people behind the scary counter. And then I was out the door!

So, best Business Registration Day yet.

I only have classes on Wednesdays, this semester. I look forward to many hours of sitting in coffee shops and bars on every other day of the week. I really don't consider a paper complete until it has had a beverage of some type spilled on it. For this I blame my undergraduate advisor, who had a similar system for grading. I was always getting essays about Saint Simeon and his desert platform returned to me with whiskey-ring stains and a note about what did I expect since the ATLA conference that weekend was at Disneyland.

I miss Reed.

Fumbling for wordity

I'm on vacation, still, so I can rarely be bothered to get off the couch for any reason other than to refill my coffee cup or find more bonbons, and that's why you never hear from me lately.

Well, technically I'm on vacation, in that the semester has yet to begin. But also technically I have many projects upcoming that I technically should probably be working on right now instead of saying what is technically wishful thinking about bonbons to the internet. Technically.

I'm putting together a presentation for a conference in March, in which my subject matter is personal narrative and the case study examines one particular personal narrative about the 18-year-old subject's experience ten years earlier in the Rwandan genocide. I have to read lots of things about discourse analysis and whatnot, because usually I only ever talk about phonetic features and I'm slightly out of my league here. And I also have to read lots of stuff about genocides, because, well, you just do.

Since this can be a little emotionally trying at times, I spell myself with times of working on a different presentation for a different conference which involves a ridiculously adorable 2-year-old talking about (usually) fire trucks and/or cookies.

Anyway, because I have very little control over any of my numerous internal dialogues, one thing that is totally inappropriate and WILL NOT GO AWAY keeps playing over and over in the back of my mind as I work on my work, and it is this sentence:

They call it genocide, people. Put that in your laputaters.

Get back to work!


(overheardinnewyork.com)

dancing stick people are the new... something

A weirdly big number of people arrive at this website at this entry, after doing a google search (or another kind of search, occasionally) for "dancing stick people". It doesn't seems strange to me that they would end up here, but it seems kind of strange that they would be looking for such a thing. Also, that there are so many other websites at which one can see stick people dancing.

Or stick FIGURES, as they seem to typically be called.

I'm doing work in a very sunny coffee shop, it's pretty great. Then later I'm going to a different place to drink wine. I anticipate that being pretty great too. See you around!

Slovenia has very good graffiti

this photo (plus others at flickr) by Michael

I'll be back in DC tomorrow. See you around!

it's a pretty fun game.

So, I'm in Trieste with some various members of my family. Yesterday was very calm and unAmerican; we had dinner (lunch) at a restaurant and then played bridge in the apartment. I drank way too much wine and did not win at the card game. A good time was had by all.

During dinner my sister introduced to us another game which we played for a really really long time. In this game, somebody thinks of something, and then everybody else thinks of something, and then everybody else says what their thing is, and then the first person says what their thing is, and then the first person decides which of the other things is most similar to their (the first person's) thing and says why.

Then it the person who thought of that's turn to go next.

I could probably explain that more clearly, but instead I will give you an example:

Cecily: okay I have one.
Michael: window
Nancy: air
Regan: Dresden
Ben: vessels
Jocelyn: the Little Mermaid
Cecily: okay, it's Alcatraz.

This was a hard one and it came down to being a battle between Dresden and the Little Mermaid, Dresden because it is a place and a town and the locus for much heartbreak and strife, and the mermaid because she sits on a rock in the ocean. But then I suddenly realized that my sister and my dad had totally been monopolizing the game, and on reflection I realized too that vessels can hold stuff, and so can Alcatraz. So the round went to Ben.

It's a pretty fun game.

Ciao

Hey! I'm in Italy. I didn't miss any of my connecting flights and none of my bags were lost or delayed. Woo Christmas!

democracy, whiskey, sexy!

We had a 4th of July party here on Saturday. It was very fun. Pictures on flickr; I have to write a paper now.