Comic strips have developed an iconography for cursing. Here are a few samples:

Mort Walker, the originator of Beetle Bailey, calls these icons jarns, quimps, nittles, and grawlixes. Linguist Arnold Zwicky prefers to call them obscenicons. In the late 1950s, looking at our local paper, the Cortland Standard, I noticed that standard spelled backwards is dradnats. I thought that dradnats would be a good name for the cuss-word surrogates. When I was working on my comics manuscript, I collected many examples from comics old and new, and posted them. They go back as far as 1909, if not farther.

I found that French grawlixes are more elaborate, on the average, than the American ones. They contain symbols of violence such as fists, skulls, and weapons more often. The closest French equivalent for “seeing stars” is “voir trente-six chandelles” (literally, to see 36 candles). This may account for the prevalence of candles in the iconography of French grawlixes. Pseudo-Chinese characters are also common there.

To approximate grawlixes on a typewriter keyboard, mostly use the shifted number keys, e.g., !@#$%^&*. It is convenient for writers of prose that cartoonists came up with an iconography that’s so easily adaptable to typing.

The linguists who post on Language Log tend to deprecate taboo avoidance, equating it with a belief in word magic. I think there should be a small set of words that show that the speaker is so upset that he or she is willing to break taboos over it. Words are better than fists for expressing strong feelings. They have to be used very infrequently. Some taboo words are used so often in movies that their power to shock is greatly diminished.

I personally dislike hearing offensive words. I try to avoid offending my audience, too. There is no contradiction here. Only offend intentionally, and it is my not intention to offend.

 

As is well known, Spanish spelling is much more phonetic than English spelling. This fact has an unexpected consequence. It is also well known that people who sound out their words and subvocalize them as they read are much slower readers. English speakers are obliged to do some form of look-say reading. They can’t sound the words letter by letter as a rule, because of the many inconsistencies of English spelling. Spanish speakers take the short cut of reading by sounding out the words. As a result, they tend to read slower.

In my computational linguist work, I had the opportunity to tabulate the kinds of spelling error most often made by students. In Spanish, the errors were overwhelmingly caused by phonetic spelling. The letters ‘b’ and ‘v’ are pronounced the same in almost every dialect of Spanish. So are the letters ‘c’ and ‘z’, and so are ‘ll’ and ‘y’. (If I wanted to make those statements more precise and general, it would take up a lot of space, so please accept them as approximations.) So the kind of error that you expect to see a Spanish child make would be writing bibir for vivir, or Me yamo for Me llamo. Foreigners are less likely to make those mistakes.

Maybe the take-away is that if you have to work extra hard to learn something, it can pay off in unanticipated ways.

I have disavowed political correctness, but nothing in this post should be taken to imply that Spanish speakers are dumb. They might read English as fast as anyone.

 

I was chatting with a fellow choir member about singing in various languages, and how to pronounce them.

There are at least three established systems for pronouncing Latin. You just have to pick one.

When I was taking Latin in high school, we learned what is often called the classical system. The letter ‘v’ was always pronounced ‘w’, ‘j’ was pronounced ‘y’, and ‘c’ and ‘g’ were always pronounced hard. Thus, ‘veni vidi vici‘ came out “way-nee, wee-dee, wee-kee,” and “Julius Caesar” was “Yoo-lee-us Kye-sar.”

The classical system was developed by philologists, mostly German, attempting to reconstruct the way the Roman senator Cato would have spoken in the second century B.C. There are no recordings of Cato’s speeches, and word-of-mouth transmission is not reliable over a span of twenty centuries. In fact, word-of-mouth is what produced modern Italian. How did the scholars find out how Cato spoke? There is evidence in the rhymes found in ancient poetry; more evidence in the way Greek words were respelled when quoted in Roman text; and still more in what happened to Latin words when various national groups adapted them to their vernaculars. There is more direct evidence in ancient language instruction manuals.

Around the end of the 19th century, British schools taught a Latin pronunciation as if the words were English. Around 1870, pedagogues at Oxford and Cambridge urged the teaching of the classical system. Like most teaching reforms, this was controversial. James Hilton used the controversy as a plot element in his 1934 novel “Goodbye, Mr. Chips.” For example:

“… This question of Latin pronunciation, for instance–I think I told you years ago that I wanted the new style used throughout the School. The other masters obeyed me; you prefer to stick to your old methods, and the result is simply chaos and inefficiency.”

At last Chips had something tangible that he could tackle. “Oh, that!” he answered scornfully. “Well, I–umph–I admit that I don’t agree with the new pronunciation. I never did. Umph–a lot of nonsense, in my opinion. Making boys say ‘Kickero’ at school when–umph–for the rest of their lives they’ll say ‘Cicero’–if they ever–umph–say it at all. And instead of ‘vicissim‘–God bless my soul–you’d make them say, ‘We kiss’im’! Umph–umph!”

Another system, which I call the church system, is to pronounce Latin words as if they were modern Italian. The hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church has tended to be composed of Italians for centuries, and their pronunciation has been influenced by their native language.

The first time I was in a choir singing “propter magnam gloriam tuam,” we were instructed to sing “mahn-yahm.” I was shocked, because I had been taught the classical system and had learned “mahg-nahm.” But it made sense, because the piece had been written for a Catholic mass.

That leads us to another system, sometimes called the Continental system, in which Latin words are pronounced as if they were German. When we sing a piece in Latin by Bach, Beethoven, or any German composer, we usually use that system. It’s also an appropriate system for pronouncing Latin names of species in biological taxonomy.

In this matter, as in many others, people become attached to the methods they learned with great effort and have adhered to for years of their life, often without realizing that there are alternative methods that are equally valid.

It’s not an issue for choirs and scientists only. We use Latin-derived words and phrases in everyday speech, such as alumnus/a/i/ae, bona fide, prima facie. Advice to lawyers: if you’re in court and the judge mispronounces a Latin phrase, be judicious. Tactfully mispronounce it the same way. (Note: bona fide, ablative case, means “in good faith,” and bona fides just means “good faith,” not a plural.)

 

1. “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”, by Victor Hugo.
2. “The Travels of Marco Polo”. Skeptical Venetians called the author “Marco Milione”.
3. “Gone with the Wind”, by Margaret Mitchell. The title translates literally to “this much of it, the wind carries away”. It sounds awkward, but it’s idiomatic in French.
4. “All Quiet on the Western Front”, novel by Erich Maria Remarque. The literal translation of the title is “In the west, nothing new”.
5. “Right You Are If You Think You Are”, play by Luigi Pirandello. Other translations are entitled “Right You Are! (If You Think So)”, “Right You Are (If You Care To Think So)”, “It Is So (If You Think So)”, and “And That’s the Truth!”
6. “The Bald Soprano”, play by Eugene Ionesco. “Cantatrice” literally means “songstress”.
7. “Being and Nothingness”, Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist work.
8. Marcel Proust’s seven-part roman fleuve, “Remembrance of Things Past”, includes the novels “Within a Budding Grove”, “The Cities of the Plain”, and “The Sweet Cheat Gone”. Just for completeness, “Du côté de chez Swann” = “Swann’s Way”, “Le temps retrouvé” = “The Past Recaptured”, “La Prisonnière” = “The Captive”, and “Le côté de Guermantes” = “The Guermantes Way”.
9. “Wuthering Heights”, novel by Emily Brontë.
10. You will have to grade yourself on this question, but the most famous examples might be “Les Misérables” by Victor Hugo, “Mein Kampf” by Adolf Hitler, and “Das Kapital” by Karl Marx.
11. “Golliwogg’s Cake-walk”. Debussy, an anglophile, intentionally used English titles for the pieces in this suite. There is no simple French equivalent for either “Golliwogg” or “cake-walk.” If it were necessary to find a French title with the same meaning, the best we could do would be something like “Danse compétitive effectuée par une poupée en étoffe représentant un ménestrel noir” (contest dance performed by a rag doll in the shape of a black minstrel).
12. William of Ockham is responsible for the philosophical maxim known as Occam’s razor, most commonly expressed as “entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem” (entities should not be multiplied more than necessary).Genesis 9:7 says, “And you, be ye fruitful, and multiply; bring forth abundantly in the earth, and multiply therein.” (KJV)
13. Orange.  The translations are orange, arancia, laranja, portocală, and naranja.  The Romanian word is derived from Greek.  The Italian word, arancia, is derived by apocope from the older malarancia.  (Prokofiev’s “Love for Three Oranges” suite comes from an Italian story, “Fabbia dell’Amore delle Tre Malarancie”.)