Phony Safires

Two times in as many weeks Language Hat has called William Safire to task for writing stunningly idiotic things. I mean, idiotic even for Safire.

In case that last sentence didn't clue you in, my dislike for Safire and what he represents borders on the irrational. Now I'm not talking about his political views, though those aren't my cup of postum either, as my father might say. No, what gets to me is his attitude towards language, which is what is known as prescriptivism. This is, more or less, the view that the actual rules of language exist on some platonic level, removed from the shadows-flickering-on-the-walls-of-the-cave rules speakers follow when they speak. You see, for you and me to speak properly we shouldn't follow our instincts, but rather abstract rules handed down from on high that run counter to our instincts.

I have a hard time convincing people that this is wrong, especially since most of the people I associate with are, like me, over-educated and have developed a reflexive elitism that is often quite justifiable. After all, people who have spent years studying some arcane topic tend to know more about that topic than other people. The difference is that language is not an obscure topic. Anyone who has mastered a language (a category that includes the uneducated, illiterate, and even many severely mentally challenged people) -- that is, anyone who can use language to express their own thoughts and understand those of others -- has developed the ability to follow rules so complex that even linguists have barely begun to discover what these rules are. It should come as no surprise, then, that when prescriptivists promulgate rules, they are usually inevented ones, which have a very shaky basis.

So what? Why should I care if William Safire invents a bunch of rules and uses his pulpit at the New York Times to spread them? Isn't that his right? Perhaps, but think of the damage prescriptivists are doing:

On the one hand, they are making people ashamed of how they talk, and adding to their insecurity about language, an insecurity that causes the word "grammar" to elicit so much fear as to drive people away from studying languages and learning about language.

But this pales in comparison to the harm prescriptivists do by perpetuating social and racial injustice. Think I'm kidding or overstating my case? Consider this: When prescriptivists criticize, let's say, double negatives as being inherently illogical, aren't they implying that people who use double negatives are themselves illogical? After all, if they just knew better, wouldn't they see that two negatives make a positive, and it just follows that you shouldn't use them? Now consider who uses double negatives: African Americans, as well as other Americans from regions and backgrounds that limit their economic and educational opportunities . But really, that's their fault -- they clearly have no grasp of logic. Well, tell that to French speakers. Or Russian speakers. Or Hebrew speakers. Or Ancient Greek speakers, if you have a time machine. Because after all, Pascal, Tolstoy, King Solomon and Aristotle were a bunch of idiots, who knew nothing about logic, or else they wouldn't have spoken languages with double negatives, right?

Whew. I'm tired now, and I haven't gotten to my point yet (and at this a British prescriptivist would yell "haven't got!"). Which is the following:

One commenter on Language Hat suggested that Safire might not even be writing his columns -- that it is common practice for well-known columnists to sign off on the work of underlings and publish it as their own work. Now, I don't know if this is true, and I certainly don't want to accuse Safire of being unethical -- only of being wrong and ignorant and the worst kind of snob. But it got me to thinking that it might be fun to try and write fake Safire columns. Not satires, but things that could pass as what Homestar might call "the for real deal." I haven't read much of Safire's writing, and I'm not going to start now, but I think I might try my hand at coming up with Safiresque (Safirian? That sounds like an Iranian Jewish name) ideas about language. When I think of some I'll post them. You kids at home can try it too; hell, this could even evolve into a meme, at which point I'll wash my proverbial hands of it.

Music Out There: Daniel Johnston and Van Dyke Parks

Time to compare and contrast two new music purchases, since I had so much fun doing that last time.

Fearing that my tastes were too pedestrian, I decided to spend holiday gift certificates on music that was decidedly strange, to wit, Daniel Johnston's "Songs of Pain" and Van Dyke Parks's "Song Cycle." In retrospect, I think that only the latter is truly weird; it is a complex, and even maddening assemblage of snippets of beautiful melodies reminiscent of... well, something vaguely musty and sepia toned, strung together using orchestras playing multiple rhythms that go in and out of phase, à la Charles Ives. The overall effect is stunning, but hard to listen to.

The story behind this album is that Warner Brothers hired former child prodigy Van Dyke Parks in 1967 to create the Next Sergeant Pepper, giving him free reign. A year and $50,000 later (thus making it, believe it or not, the most expensive record ever made up to that point) the album was released in 1968 to great fanfare. Needless to say, the record-buying public wasn't ready for such an album. In all honesty, I'm not sure I'm ready for it either.

I also bought Daniel Johnston's "Songs of Pain," a collection of recordings Johnston made in 1980-81 in his parents' living room on a boombox. Johnston eventually found a cult following that included a fair number of celebrities, but his struggle with bipolar disorder made him unable to reach a mass audience.

I'm left wondering if anyone would consider Daniel Johnston an "outsider artist" if his recordings were professionally made, or if they were ignorant of his mental illness. His music is incredibly straight-forward -- simple direct melodies, truly astonishing in their elegance. The lyrics are sometimes a bit odd, but so are most lyrics. On the other hand, perhaps if the recordings sounded more normal no one would notice them.

In the end then, even when I try to buy weird music I wind up getting normal music that just seems weird.

As a sad footnote, Daniel Johnston was hospitalized recently for various serious health problems. He's out of the hospital now; let's wish him a refuah shleimah.

From Joisey City to Boibon Street

In an excellent, albeit depressing New Yorker article this week (Yes I do read other things besides the New Yorker -- just not often) about the New Orleans police, Dan Baum speculates that New Orleanians say "woik" because

New Orleans experienced the same wave of nineteenth-century immigrants that swelled the East Coast--from Ireland, Germany and Italy.

This can't be the explanation, for the simple reason that plenty of other places (Chicago, for instance) experienced the same immigration, but not the sound change. Oddly enough, a couple of months ago the New Yorker quoted no less an authority than William Labov observing, rightly, that although the New York dialect is thriving, it is losing this very feature (as well as a few others I'll write about later). Interviews in the wake of the hurricane demonstrated that in New Orleans this feature is robust. Setting it further apart from its northeastern counterpart is the fact that in New Orleans this feature has no racial dimension (think of Louis Armstrong singing "What A Wonderful Woild"), whereas the now-dying New York area "oi" never was part of the local African American vernacular, even though it has incorporated other distinct New York features.

So where does this strange feature come from? My guess, and I don't think I'm too far out on a limb, is that it is what is known as retroflex, or rhotacized, vowel coloring. That is, in both New Orleans and the New York area "r"s are dropped after vowels, like in many other kinds of English, and in some -- not all -- of the dialects where this happens, it alters the preceding vowel. I think it's jut an odd parallel development in these two non-rhotic ("r" dropping) urban dialects that can be explained without recourse to history, aside from the forces that led to derhotacization throught the Eastern Seaboard and Gulf Coast.

I have to admit though that my gestalt impression of New Orleans English is that it is strongly suggestive of an East Coast city, with a whiff of southernness. Sort of like Philadelphia.

Pentatonic in Blue

Though my two favorite topics -- music and language -- are fairly technical ones, I try to avoid writing about them in two much technical detail for two reasons:

1) I want people to enjoy reading this, and I don't want to alienate or bore anyone if I don't have to, and

2) I don't really know how. I'm largely self-taught in both subjects, which means I've picked up bits and pieces of the jargon, but I can't use them with confidence.

But now I want to write about something a bit technical. I will try to do so in a way that neither bores readers nor esposes my ignorance. Here goes.

A few weeks ago Bobby Lightfoot wrote a long rant about guitarist Carlos Santana. Me, I've never felt one way or the other about Santana -- he always seemed pleasant and innocuous, like most guitar virtuosos. I make an exception for Hendrix, but that's because he's a strong (and underappreciated) songwriter, not just an accomplished technician. In any case, Bobby Lightfoot characterizes Santana's playing as "pentatonic woodly-woodly" -- an apt description.

"Pentatonic" is a mode, that is, a subset of notes. If you think of the notes in the melody of "Oh Susannah" (or just about any Stephen Foster song), that's the pentatonic mode. Santana does spend a lot of his solos aimlessly wandering around the pentatonic scale. But when I first read this, I thought, "Well, pentatonic woodly-woodly is a darn sight better than blues woodly-woodly." Which is not to knock the blues, by any means -- just the mediocre musicians who use the blues as a crutch, because you can sound a lot more competent than you are if you stick to the blues, especially if you don't have an ear. Of course, this trick has its limitations, most significantly that it only works with songs that are in a blues mode. Nothing is quite as jarring as a song with pentatonic melody and harmonies with a blues solo plunked down in it, and yet you hear this fairly often. Indeed, musicians who affect faux-naif sensibilities sometimes do this intentionally, a prime example being the Velvet Underground -- if you know the guitar solo from "Pale Blue Eyes" then you know what I'm talking about.

It's a shame these modes don't mix happily, because they are the two most American modes. Some argue that the ubiquity of pentatonic music is the heritage of Scotch-Irish immigrants. That may be the case, tough I'm skeptical of attempts to demonstrate Scotch-Irish roots for American things. The heritage of the blues scale is also controversial. Of course it is African American in origin, but many seek to trace it to Africa, something else I'm skeptical of. The only element of the blues I've ever heard an African precedent for is guitar polyrhythm, which is fairly superficial, and is limited to early blues. But the blues scale never sounded particulary African to me. I think it is really an innovation of African-American culture. which I think makes it even cooler than if it were imported. Nevertheless, given that these two modes are so fundamentally American, you might expect them to combine more gracefully.

Why is this combination so jarring? I thought about it for a while, and the best answer I could come up with is that the dominant seventh in the blues scale (one of the most important notes in it) interferes with the sixth, which is crucial to the pentatonic. Earlier I thought it might have to do with the third of the blues scale, which is "blue" -- it exploits sliding and semitones to create an ambiguity between major and minor. But the third is not the problem, as I can prove.

The following is a field recording from 1926 in Darien, GA of W. M. Givens singing a spiritual called "Deep Down In My Heart."

Notice that it is strongly pentatonic, and yet the thirds are blue -- hear how he swings up to it on "everybody". Note furthermore that there is nothing remarkable about this -- it sounds prefectly natural. (While I'm at it, I can't help pointing out the strange vowels in the words "heart" and "brother.")

What could be more American than this? Pentatonic with a blue third. Ebony and Ivory. And now that I'm aware of this combination, I hear it everywhere, even in my own songs.

Latin Radio and Yiddish

Alert reader November alerted me to the existence of Nuntii Latini, Radio Finland's Latin news reports, which can be heard online. I listened to it, and found it interesting. The pronunciation is the so-called "classical" pronunciation, devised by philologists in the 18th and 19th centuries, as opposed to the various traditional "church" pronunciations used for Catholic liturgy, although they pronounced v/consonantal u as v, whereas I was taught to pronounce it as "w." Heck, for all I know, so were they, except for them "w" sounds like "v." Wery interesting. More interesting, though, was the effect of their Finnish accents, which were readily apparent -- no big surprise. On the one hand, the heavy Finnish "l" was a bit jarring and seemed out of place (although I admit I have never heard Latin spoken by a native speaker), but on the other hand the Finnish distinction between short and long consonants suits Latin very well, which shares this distinction, and was clearly audible.

All this got me thinking about the phenomenon of Latinism and its cousin Sanskritism -- I'm using these terms to mean people who think the world needs news radio broadcasts in these languages, people who raise their children speaking them, people who form clubs and go to meetings and retreats where everyone speaks. In particular I thought about the relation of these movements to Yiddishism.

The fundamental difference is that Latin and Sanskrit have had no real native speakers for over a thousand years, and a good deal more than that in the case of Sanskrit. Yiddish, on the other hand, is thriving -- a short subway ride will take me to large communities with a vibrant culture, in which children grow up knowing no other language besides Yiddish. I'm referring, of course, to the Hasidic communities. So given that Yiddish is neither dead nor dying, it begins to seem odd that there are people whose behavior towards Yiddish is reminiscent of other people's behavior towards Sanskrit or Latin. Do I have anything against such people? Absolutely not -- I admire their dedication and idealism. In fact I'm on the board of an organization that encourages young people to speak Yiddish and to foster the growth of new Yiddish-speaking communities. I go to Yiddish-speaking events, and I may even raise my children in Yiddish. But I do think that such behavior contributes to the misconception that Yiddish is dead or dying, and I think some Yiddishists cross a line when they present themselves, even inadvertently, as "saving Yiddish."

Who is acting more strangely? People who make news reports and raise their children in dead languages, or people who treat a living language as if it were dying? I don't know. On the one hand, a Latin radio show in Finland is patently absurd, not that I am against absurdity as such. On the other, it was the same impulse that resurrected the long-dead Hebrew language, thus giving birth to Modern Hebrew, or Israeli, as some argue it should be called. Go know.

British Hits

A few posts ago I mentioned the phenomenon of songs that become big hits in England and never cross the ocean. On the one hand, there should be nothing surprising about this; why shouldn't two countries have different musical cultures? But given the profound mutual influence American and British pop music have had on each other, it is a bit surprising to find out that something that's a big deal over there can remain unknown here. Rather than write a comprehensive post on this topic (something I have neither the knowledge nor energy for) I will make a few passing comments and observations.

1. The Beatles are only the most prominent example of a British band fundamentally reshaping American pop music. But did you know that Beatlemania went on for an entire year in England (and other parts of Europe) before anyone here knew about them? It's true, and in fact scant months before the famous Ed Sullivan performance George Harrison silently (invisibly?) came to the States to visit his sister, who was living in southern Illinois. Apparently he tried to find Beatles records and failed, even though Chicago-based VeeJay records had released a few singles.

2. Indeed, before the Beatles, British pop was not entirely unknown in America. The first British song to be a hit in America was 1962's "Telstar" by the Tornados, written and produced by the idiosyncratically brilliant Joe Meek. The only other Joe Meek production (and possibly composition - there's some dispute) to find success in America was 1964's "Come Right Back" by the Honeycombs. In England, however, he is remembered for producing such hits as "What Do You Want To Make Those Eyes At Me For," "Johnny Remember Me," and "Just Like Eddie." If you've heard of these, then you're either a Joe Meek fan or not American.

3. Quick, what was the biggest hit of Paul McCartney's solo career? Why, "Mull of Kintyre," of course. At least in England, where it was so popular that anyone who can remember when it was on the radio is utterly sick of it; it set a record for the best selling album in the United Kingdom that lasted for seven years, yet it is virtually unknown in the States. I had never heard of it until recently, though I never would have believed it if someone told me I'd never heard Paul McCartney's biggest hit.

4. Of course, this works both ways; sometimes some American music stays put and never makes an impact in the UK. Occasionally, British music will only be succesful in the US (and vice-versa, though I can't think of an example offhand). For instance, the Zombies' biggest hit in the US was "Time of the Season," which was never popular in England. This is somewhat ironic, because the album it was on, "Odessey (sic) and Oracle" was only released in the US after much wrangling on the part of Blood, Sweat and Tears keyboardist Al Kooper. If you are at all a fan of mid-to-late-sixties British pop, buy this album - it fully merits its cult status.

So what does all this show? I'm not sure; other than that anyone taking into account the compex interaction of British and American pop would do well to note the relative isolation of the two countries, which in my opinion is what makes this interaction so fruitful. And I'll explain why in a later post. Have a happy new year!

An Album-like Entity

Through months of toil and procrastination I have compiled an hour's worth of original music, which can be burned onto a Compact Disc (A "C.-D." to those in the know). I have also made cover art and a track listing, both of which may be printed on paper. The result, when properly assembled, greatly resembles an album. If you'd like a copy, let me know and I'll send you one.

The album is called "Seventeen Songs for Cory," and if you know me then you probably know why. The artwork was created by the selfsame Cory, and it looks like this:


Snazzy, eh? The music's not half bad either, if you like that sort of thing.