SLOW Movement

FT: Forget dong the 'math' and stick to proper English

Source: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/be8ae0b0-eabc-11e0-ac18-00144feab49a.html#ixzz1aGV775ud

October 3, 2011 2:52 am

Forget doing the ‘math’ and stick to proper English

By Lucy Kellaway

Last week, I was sent an email from a “work-life balance expert” offering tips on staying cheerful in times of financial strife.

What struck me most about this message – apart from its trite fatuousness – was the assumption that we need cheering up when the economy is down.

I have never seen any evidence that happiness moves in tandem with economic activity. I’m no less happy now than I was in the boom of the mid-2000s. And if I am upset, it’s not because of the economy but because the ceiling has just fallen down in my hall and so there is grit in my bed and in the fridge.

In fact, it’s possible that happiness may even rise in recessions. There was a study a couple of years ago that showed that people in work are marginally more content during hard times because they are grateful to have a job.

However, according to last week’s press release, the path to good cheer in recession lies through “living exponentially”. Just looking at this phrase causes my happiness levels to suffer a dip. The word “exponential” has taken a lot of abuse from managers who use it to describe any growth that is more than sluggish. Whereas in maths an exponential graph goes swiftly from almost flat to almost vertical, this pattern is seldom traced by any market I’ve ever come across.

But now the term seems to have slipped free of its mathematical moorings altogether: living “exponentially” involves having “quality time with yourself” and “living in your own truth”.

Speaking from the vantage point of my own truth, I find some things are truer than others. Truest of all are mathematical truths, and it is therefore upsetting to see them being pilfered shamelessly by innumerate managers eager to lend an aura of fact to what is usually a glob of guff.

Exponential is the least of it. Now every happening in business is called a “data point”, and change is increasingly known as “delta”, as in “what’s the delta on that?”

“Inflection point” is similarly debased. In maths, this is when the curvature goes from positive to negative but to managers it is a grandiose way of saying maximum or minimum. Last month, I saw it had been degraded further in a gung-ho article on the Huffington Post by a social entrepreneur entitled “The Inflection Point, The ‘Aha’ Moment” – in which it meant nothing at all.

Managers have a long history in playing fast and loose with percentages to make themselves look good. When it comes to effort, an impossible 110 per cent used to be regarded as a bare minimum.

Now hyperinflation has taken hold. A few weeks ago in Australia, the highest ever illegitimate percentage scoring was recorded when ex-cricketer Tim Nielsen said he was “100,000 per cent behind Australia being the best team in the world”.

All sorts of other things are just plain wrong when they are translated from maths to business talk. “To decimate” means to reduce by one-tenth; it does not mean to slash. “Infinite” means immeasurably large; it isn’t a general term to mean a lot. And “quantum” is something very, very small, not something very, very big.

More distressing than any of the above, however, is the phrase “Do the math”. This would be fine if it were a genuine invitation to whip out one’s slide rule. Instead it is a slightly threatening way of asserting: I’m right and I have logic on my side.

Last month, Barack Obama claimed that his tax package “isn’t class warfare. It’s math.” But it wasn’t math, really. It was politics. Yet at least President Obama is American, and so the phrase sounds better on his lips. On BBC Radio Four last week, I heard a Brit taking about the far right in UK politics, urging listeners to “do the maths” – which sounded even worse.

The strangest thing about all this misuse of mathematics is that when there is an actual need to discuss figures, managers go all coy, and proper numerical terms are nowhere to be seen.

Indeed, in business, numbers are not called numbers any more – they are called “metrics”. Which is a bit bizarre, when you think that metrics are about the study of metre in poetry. And in the mouths of modern managers, numbers no longer do anything as basic as go up and down: they go north and south as if they were points on a map.

Last week in a meeting I heard a finance manager say the following words: “We’re looking to see our metrics coming in north of the 3 mill mark.”

If he had done the maths before opening his mouth, he might have put it rather better and said: the number will be bigger than three million or X>3m.

lucy.kellaway@ft.com

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011

FT: My shallow affair with Twitter

Source - http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/db87a0e2-a401-11e0-8b4f-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1VXkE736U

July 8, 2011 10:10 pm

My shallow affair with Twitter

By Harry Eyres

Tweets are the perfect mode of (pseudo) communication for the age of narcissism

Readers, I have to confess to a foolish dalliance. Perhaps it was her sheer youthfulness that seduced me. Surely it was not the fact that she couldn’t string more than two sentences together. Or was it just that I, a middle-aged man, wanted confirmation that I could still attract – followers?

If you asked me what induced me to sign up to Twitter, I would say it was a vague desire to connect, combined with a fair dose of feline curiosity. Like the proverbial cat, I should have been wiser: what was I to expect from a medium designed (by its founder Jack Dorsey) to deliver “short burst[s] of inconsequential information”, 40.55 per cent of whose content was found in a survey in August 2009 by Pear Analytics to consist of “pointless babble”. Now that I am no longer under its spell, Twitter seems to me one of the greatest time-wasters ever conceived.

Pear Analytics classified 37.55 per cent of tweets in its survey as “conversational” but there is quite a difference between having the vague characteristics of a conversation and consisting of a true conversation. A conversation requires that you know whom you are addressing; it is predicated on a certain courtesy. People who simply shout, scream or throw comments into the air are not conversing; they may well be mad.

The lack of a sense of address is the problem with many or most political tweets. I haven’t yet received any from Barack Obama, but some of the most leaden-footed on my Twitter page have emanated from the new British Labour leader Ed Miliband. Comedians rightly made fun of a message he sent out on the eve of the big union demonstration on March 26 against the cuts: “See some of you there”, it went, provoking unfavourable comparison with some of the more stirring rallying-cries in history (“Once more unto the breach, dear friends”, “We shall fight on the beaches” etc). Another recent Miliband tweet ran as follows: “I’m looking forward to setting out some important changes ahead for Labour in my speech to the national policy forum on Saturday.” If anyone can imagine a less appetising taster for anything, let me know.

Fleetingly I had a notion that Twitter might be a medium for poetry – in particular for the haiku. One distinguished musician I followed approached this level in some of his tweets – aperçus of delicate beauty. But I fear I am too selfish; if I wrote what I thought was a good haiku I would not post it on Twitter.

The other literary form to which a tweet might aspire is the aphorism. I was impressed that the author Alain de Botton bothered to post aphorisms on Twitter but disappointed by examples such as, “The world is hardly short of good ideas – the challenge is how to make them take hold and stick.” This seemed more of a truism than an aphorism. Good aphorisms have a quality that is both distilled and poignant, the ability to pierce through the veils of ordinary perception to a bitter truth. This example verged on the vapid, like so much else on Twitter. But then, if you coined a really good aphorism, surely you would put it in a book.

No doubt I was foolish to expect conversation, or poetry, or philosophy from Twitter. Apart from being an amplifying chamber for rumour and gossip, it is the perfect mode of (pseudo) communication for the age of narcissism. I read tweets from perfectly intelligent people that informed me that they still had a sniffly cold or were making their third cup of tea of the morning; one went something like this: “I.REALLY.MUST.GET.DOWN.TO.WORK.” A psychoanalyst might have something to say about that: a displacement of a displacement?

The fundamental thing about tweets is they are nearly always about “me”; in fact, many might as well read, “Me! Me! Me!” If they do not describe some irrelevant detail of everyday life, their aim, whether confessed or covert, tends to be self-promotion. They are the product of what historian Christopher Lasch called the “the new narcissist ... who doubts even the reality of his own existence.”

Twitter is not just a phoney form of conversation, it is a deceptive medium for discussion. Because of the limit on characters, tweets move towards closure, and this is where the aesthetics and the politics of Twitter combine in a sort of negative synergy. Haikus and aphorisms are tight, terse forms achieved under intense pressure; they justify their brevity because of their concentration, like a reduced sauce. But Tweets are just short; they give the impression of decisiveness without having said anything decisive. After “Me! Me! Me!” they say “I’m right”.

God help anyone who appealed to Twitter as a court of justice. Good arguments or exchanges need the long, slow haul, not the addictive jabber of Twitter. But, for all that, Twitter did perform one service for me, helping me to survive the recent royal wedding as I read irreverent tweets about the choice of music and the archbishop’s mad hair.

harry.eyres@ft.com

More columns at www.ft.com/eyres

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

FT: When words fail us all

Source - http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/b2a412e2-c723-11e0-a9ef-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1VXjX6lRZ

August 19, 2011 10:10 pm

When words fail us all

By Harry Eyres

If the riots in English cities both invited and defied commentary, that was surely because they seemed so inarticulate

Response: Riot police in front of a burning building in Croydon, south London, on August 8

If the riots in English cities, including my home city of London, both invited and defied commentary, that was surely because they seemed so inarticulate. The BBC began by calling these outbreaks “protests” but withdrew this description when, after the original non-violent demonstration about the shooting of Mark Duggan, what appeared to be taking place was more or less random acts of destruction, arson and looting. Those arrested were shame-faced and silent rather than defiant and vocal. People on the streets heckling politicians or being interviewed by journalists did have things to say but their remarks, however suggestive, did not really amount to reasons for action.

So these were not protests in any articulate sense – in the sense, that is, of having a defined target or grievance at their core. They were different from the only other riots in London that I can remember, the Brixton riots of 1981 and 1985 and the poll tax riot of 1990; the former arising out of long-standing tensions between the black community and the police, as the subsequent Scarman report confirmed, and the latter arising out of a demonstration against a levy very widely seen as unfair. They were also different from the essentially non-violent protests of the Spanish indignados, people with defined grievances, especially concerning unemployment, able at least to articulate their own mood. They were certainly different from the protests in Tahrir Square, marked by bravery and eloquence.

An inarticulate protest is both easier and more difficult to respond to. You can respond with punitive authoritarianism, on the grounds that if those responsible for violence cannot come up with reasons for their actions, then they have no reasons and should be sent to prison – an experience which, no doubt, will create a whole new set of reasons. That is the way of repression, at both a social and an individual, psychological level. In the second of his Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Freud develops a suggestive analogy to explain the nature of repression; a noisy heckler at his lecture, “whose ill-mannered laughter, chattering and shuffling with his feet are distracting my attention”, is manhandled out of the room by three or four strongmen, who barricade the door. But that may well not be the end of the story; perhaps the expelled individual, “who has become embittered and reckless, will cause us further trouble”.

Repressing inarticulate protest may well cause further trouble. I think the first thing to do is to look at the thing which defines these protests – inarticulateness itself. You can view these events as a peculiarly English tragedy of inarticulateness. Being inarticulate means being unable to express yourself clearly, fluently or intelligibly. My dictionary gives as a suggestive example the phrase “inarticulate suffering”. Inarticulate suffering is no less real than articulate suffering; in fact it may be even more painful, because giving expression to suffering tends to alleviate it.

You can view these events as a peculiarly English tragedy of inarticulateness

A week or two before the riots, I was listening to an astonishing feature on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme about the language deprivation of many young British children. According to the British government’s “poverty tsar” Frank Field, some children arriving for their first day at school do not know their own names. The government’s communication champion for children, Jean Gross, quoted a young mother talking about her small child: “He don’t [sic] speak to me, so I don’t speak to him.” The point made by a Manchester head teacher, Neil Wilson, was that many parents are no longer speaking to their children, beyond the most basic level, so it is no wonder that the children have difficulty learning to speak, or developing a satisfyingly rich vocabulary. Here is the tragedy of inarticulateness in its starkest form.

It is something you can see being passed on from generation to generation and, though there may be biological bases for some cases of language impairment, it is obviously at least partly associated with social deprivation. I doubt there are many instances of middle-class mothers not speaking to their toddlers.

Widespread civil disorder, as opposed to essentially peaceful protest, has occurred very rarely in Britain in the 20th century. In my lifetime it has happened only under very specific circumstances, when austerity programmes were being pushed through in the teeth of recession, or when there was a general sense of manifest inequity. To attribute it to “criminality, pure and simple”, as the British prime minister and others have done, is to commit the language crime of tautology. Of course criminality is criminality. But that gets you no closer to understanding anything.

Here the ruling classes seem as inarticulate as the so-called rioting underclass. Perhaps we should not be surprised, since in England (not in Scotland, Ireland or Wales) there is an inarticulateness of the upper classes, the mumbling, stumbling inability to perceive what is staring you in the face.

harry.eyres@ft.com

More columns at www.ft.com/eyres

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

WSJ: What in the Word? Rules For Better Punmanship

WORD CRAFT
APRIL 9, 2011

What in the Word? Rules For Better Punmanship 

By JOHN POLLACK

The hardened vegetables, stalkers on death row, began chanting: "Lettuce out!" A gourd, sensing a plot, scanned the celery, but Cool Head Luke was already over the garden wall and into his getaway car. A Pinto, it wasn't mulch to look at, but the hot tomato behind the wheel sure was. Luke gave her a peck and told her to floret. "I'm a new man, Julie Anne," he said. "Head for Boston. I can blend in there—just arugula guy."

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March 19 was National Corndog Day

For readers who can't stand puns, this tale of escape is both crime and punishment. For punsters, it is a cornucopia of 20 puns. But in the perpetual war of wit between those who would steal meanings and those who would lock them up, there is a middle ground—rules to pun by, most of which I've just broken.

Puns are at their best when spoken, because they derive most of their power from ambiguity—ambiguity that is often diminished in the act of writing. Spelling a word requires us to favor one meaning over another, which saps a pun of dual interpretations as soon as it is read. This is one reason puns enjoyed their heyday in English prior to the spread of the printing press.

Shakespeare and his audiences loved puns, both comic and serious—think, for example, of Richard III's unhappiness with the "glorious summer" made by "this sun of York." Since the Elizabethan era, though, the standardization of English and the pursuit of scientific certainty have elbowed the unruly pun out to the very margins of acceptability.

To avoid making an unwelcome pun, focus first on the meanings or associations the pun will evoke and only secondarily on humor. Contrary to popular perceptions, a pun doesn't have to draw a laugh or a groan. Its primary role is to serve as an intellectual hyperlink, a form of shorthand that lets us pack more meaning into fewer words. This is not an argument against funny puns, but effective humor usually flows from unexpected meaning. In 2006, for example, the New York Post announced President George W. Bush's dismissal of his long-serving Secretary of Defense with the headline RUMS FELLED.

Also, never underestimate the intelligence of your audience. As listeners, we constantly intuit meaning from incomplete and approximate information; this is intrinsic to every conversation. It's why we can hear "lettuce" and, in the right context, understand it as "let us." That said, if a listener or reader somehow misses or ignores your wit, just let it go quietly. Even a fine bottle of wine will languish from time to time, overlooked in the cellar.

And just because you can make a pun doesn't mean that you should. Quality counts, and others will consider you wittier for being selective in your wordplay. Remember, puns generally make great appetizers but rarely fare well as conversational entrees, so choose your puns carefully.

Finally, pun with pride. Not only do we need more levity in this world, but we owe our very literacy to the humble pun. It was frustrated ancient scribes who first realized the limitations of literal pictographs and began decoupling and recombining sounds, symbols and meanings—in short, punning—to invent history's first true alphabet. Without puns, you wouldn't be reading this newspaper—unless it were in hieroglyphs.

So the next time you're inspired to pun, make it count. With practice, it's as easy as pi.

—Mr. Pollack's new book is "The Pun Also Rises: How the Humble Pun Revolutionized Language, Changed History and Made Wordplay More than Some Antics." —He is a former speechwriter for Bill Clinton.Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page C12

Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

FT: Writing is on the wall for 'customer care'

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d19de002-572e-11e0-9035-00144feab49a.html#ixzz1Hu06GM4j

Writing is on the wall for ‘customer care’

By Lucy Kellaway

Published: March 27 2011 15:52 | Last updated: March 27 2011 15:52

On the lavatory wall of a colleague’s flat in Hong Kong hangs a framed letter. It is written on HSBC notepaper, and dated January 22, 1998. “Dear Sir,” it begins. “Please note that we have had occasion to return your cheque due to insufficient funds in the above account. This state of affairs is most unsatisfactory and the practice of issuing cheques without first ensuring that there are sufficient funds to meet them must cease forthwith, otherwise it will be necessary for your account in our books to be closed.

“Yours faithfully, P. Mandal, assistant manager customer deposits, Bangalore branch.”

EDITOR’S CHOICE

Lucy Kellaway: China conniptions - Mar-20

Lucy Kellaway: Business leaders are worse than they think - Mar-13

Lucy Kellaway: Pen and paper are a forgotten management tool - Mar-06

Lucy Kellaway: Female quotas would target the wrong women - Feb-27

Lucy Kellaway: Talk like a loser and you might win - Feb-13

Lucy Kellaway: Banks, a conman and a homeless bloke - Feb-06

In displaying this letter in such a prominent place, my colleague was seeking to amuse his visitors with its Indian-English verbosity. In reprinting it here, I have a grander purpose. For all its stiff wording, it is the best letter to a customer I’ve ever seen. It sums up everything that used to be good about banking, but which has got hopelessly lost. Indeed, if all bankers still behaved like P. Mandal, there would have been no financial crisis.

For him, banking was a solemn matter, where prudence was all- important. In his world, there was none of the dodgy stuff that all banks now routinely engage in: pretending the customer is king while fleecing them if they go into the red, and investing their money in incomprehensible and ruinous financial instruments. Instead, recalcitrant customers were given a thorough telling off – which made them behave better. My colleague tells me that he has, indeed, ceased his unsatisfactory behaviour forthwith: he has not bounced a cheque since January 1998.

It all makes one wish P. Mandal had been transported from Bangalore to the London HQ and made chief executive instead of Sir John Bond. The Indian banker would never in a million years have agreed to the £9bn takeover of Household, the US subprime lender it bought in 2002. He would have cast one eye over the loan book with its millions of dodgy customers who could not afford their mortgages and said he wanted nothing to do with them.

But it is not just his prudence I like. It’s his writing style, too. Though somewhat pompous, it is short and to the point. And despite its threatening message, it is immaculately polite. “This state of affairs is most unsatisfactory” is a delightful and useful phrase that deserves to be rehabilitated at once.

The same day I was inspecting the walls of my colleague’s lavatory so approvingly, I was e-mailed an exchange that had just taken place between an FT reader and Comcast. She had sent a brief message to the cable operator complaining that she couldn’t find out how to get her mobile phone bill itemised. The reply was everything the lavatory letter was not: disingenuous, unintelligent, emotionally incontinent, unhelpful and miles too long.

“We are very glad to have you as part of Comcast family,” it began, unpromisingly. The idea that in signing up for an account with a mobile phone operator, one is not merely agreeing to share its airwaves but to share its genetic lineage is most disturbing.

The e-mail continued “ . . . and it is our privilege to provide you an exceptional and unparalleled customer service”. This is even worse – a combination of excessive bowing and scraping with excessive boasting, without conveying any meaning at all.

“Thank you for bringing this billing concern to our attention, Elizabeth”, it goes on. “Elizabeth”? How dare they? P. Mandal would have had a stroke at such fresh familiarity.

“Rest assured that we will properly address the concern by making sure that the best resolution will be provided to suffice your overall satisfaction . . . ”

I’m getting restive even typing this drivel out and so you will have to believe me that there are 500 more words of the same, including further apologies, further congratulations and wishes that Elizabeth have a nice day – without actually solving the problem in hand.

“We appreciate that you took time out from your busy schedule to share your concerns,” it said. But if they thought her schedule was busy, why did they think she would have time to read so much guff?

Finally, the sign off: a first name and a title, Comcast customer care specialist. At last, something with meaning. The author of this reply has proved herself a specialist in “customer care” – a virtuoso at apology and making all the most fashionable noises. The only problem is that there is no need for specialists in this area. Customers don’t want “care”. They just want their bills itemised.

lucy.kellaway@ft.com

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

ST: OMG! Look this up in the dictionary

News

Home > News > World > Story

Mar 27, 2011

OMG! Look this up in the dictionary

Internet-inspired and other new abbreviations make it to Oxford English Dictionary's online update

 

London - OMG! The exclamatory online abbreviation has won the approval of the Oxford English Dictionary.

The term - short for 'Oh my God' or 'Oh my gosh' - is one of dozens of new entries in the authoritative reference book's latest online update.

Other Internet-inspired expressions given the stamp of approval include LOL, 'laughing out loud'; IMHO, 'in my humble opinion'; and BFF, 'best friends forever'.

Dictionary compilers say that although the terms are associated with modern electronic communications, some are surprisingly old. The first confirmed use of 'OMG' was in a letter in 1917.

'Things people think are new words normally have a longer history,' says Mr Graeme Diamond, the dictionary's principal editor for new words.

'Who knows how many people from 1917 onwards were using that term, in correspondence that we just don't have access to. With the advent of the mass media we have access to much more personal information.'

That helps explain a flood of new terms from the online world, including ego-surfing - the practice of searching for your own name on the Internet - and dot bomb, a failed Internet company.

But not all the new abbreviations originated online. One new entry is wag, for 'wives and girlfriends'. First used in 2002 to describe the female partners of the England football team, it is now used to denote the glamorous and extravagant female partners of male celebrities.

The new update includes about 900 new words and meanings, from 'flat white' - a milky espresso-based drink originating from Australia and New Zealand - to 'muffin top', defined as 'a protuberance of flesh above the waistband of a tight pair of trousers'.

The dictionary includes a new entry for 'heart' as a verb, a casual equivalent of 'to love' that is represented with a symbol, as seen on millions of souvenirs proclaiming 'I (heart) New York.' Editors publish updates to the online Oxford every three months.

The Internet version of the dictionary, launched in 2000, gets two million hits a month from subscribers and may eventually replace the mammoth 20-volume printed Oxford English Dictionary, last published in 1989.

By the time lexicographers finish revising and updating a new edition - a gargantuan task that takes a decade or more - publishers doubt there will be a market for the printed form. By then, a multi-volume printed work may be - to use another new OED entry - TMI: too much information.

Reuters

The dictionary includes a new entry for 'heart' as a verb, a casual equivalent of 'to love' that is represented with a symbol, as seen on millions of souvenirs proclaiming 'I (heart) New York.'

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LOL, TEACHERS WON'T ACCEPT IT

Just because the Oxford English Dictionary has accepted abbreviations such as OMG, LOL and BFF and usage of 'heart' as a verb to mean 'to love', it does not mean that English language and literature teachers in Singapore are prepared to accept them in students' schoolwork and essays.

Five teachers The Sunday Times spoke to unanimously agreed that they would penalise a student who uses the abbreviations in essays.

Most of them, like Mrs Shamini Rajandran of St Margaret's Secondary School, cited reasons of formality.

'Any writing piece is a formal piece of work, and these words are rather informal, the sort you would use in an e-mail or SMS.

'They're definitely not acceptable in national exams, so why allow the use of them at school level? Regardless, I'm personally quite traditional and particular about these sorts of things, and wouldn't allow them.'

And what about students who argue that they should be allowed to use these newfangled words because they are in the dictionary?

An English department head of an all-boys secondary school, who wanted to be known only as

Mr Liang, had this to say: 'The four-letter word is in the dictionary, but that doesn't mean you use it in your schoolwork, right?'

Heather Marie Lee

NY Times: Teaching to the Text Message

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March 19, 2011

Teaching to the Text Message

By ANDY SELSBERG

I’VE been teaching college freshmen to write the five-paragraph essay and its bully of a cousin, the research paper, for years. But these forms invite font-size manipulation, plagiarism and clichés. We need to set our sights not lower, but shorter.

I don’t expect all my graduates to go on to Twitter-based careers, but learning how to write concisely, to express one key detail succinctly and eloquently, is an incredibly useful skill, and more in tune with most students’ daily chatter, as well as the world’s conversation. The photo caption has never been more vital.

So a few years ago, I started slipping my classes short writing assignments alongside the required papers. Once, I asked them, “Come up with two lines of copy to sell something you’re wearing now on eBay.” The mix of commerce and fashion stirred interest, and despite having 30 students in each class, I could give everyone serious individual attention. For another project, I asked them to describe the essence of the chalkboard in one or two sentences. One student wrote, “A chalkboard is a lot like memory: often jumbled, unorganized and sloppy. Even after it’s erased, there are traces of everything that’s been written on it.”

This was great, but I want to go shorter. Like many who teach, I keep thinking the perfect syllabus is a semester away — with just a few tweaks, and maybe a total pedagogical overhaul. My ideal composition class would include assignments like “Write coherent and original comments for five YouTube videos, quickly telling us why surprised kittens or unconventional wedding dances resonate with millions,” and “Write Amazon reviews, including a bit of summary, insight and analysis, for three canonical works we read this semester (points off for gratuitous modern argot and emoticons).”

The longest assignment could be a cover letter, and even that might be streamlined to a networking e-mail. I’d rather my students master skills like these than proper style for citations.

A lot can be said with a little — the mundane and the extraordinary. Philosophers like Confucius (“Learning without thought is labor lost. Thought without learning is perilous.”) and Nietzsche were kings of the aphorism.

And short isn’t necessarily a shortcut. When you have only a sentence or two, there’s nowhere to hide. I’m not suggesting that colleges eliminate long writing projects from English courses, but maybe we should save them for the second semester. Rewarding concision first will encourage students to be economical and innovative with language. Who knows, we might even start to leave behind text messages and comment threads that our civilization can be proud of.

Andy Selsberg, the editor of “Dear Old Love: Anonymous Notes to Former Crushes, Sweethearts, Husbands, Wives and Ones That Got Away,” teaches English at John Jay College.

ST: Acronyms can really baffle, FYI

Lifestyle

Home > Lifestyle > Reflect > Story

Jan 16, 2011

Acronyms can really baffle, FYI

By Fiona Chan

 

Last week I received one of the most enigmatic e-mails of my life.

'Hi,' it said, followed by an attachment. And then a single mystifying word: 'Fynap'.

I was befuddled, but intrigued. Was this a cryptic cipher meant to be decoded? Had I somehow intercepted a secret spy missive? Could it be one of those infamous Wiki Leaks documents flooding the Internet?

I reluctantly decided that was unlikely. For one thing, the Wiki Leaks records were supposed to contain unending pages of meaningless nonsense, not just one meaningless nonsense word.

So then I tried to puzzle it out. Did 'fynap' mean Five Year New Action Plan? Four Youths Nuke A Playground? Feed Your Nasty Angry Panda? Fancy Yellow Nylon Ankle Pants?

Before my head exploded with the possibilities, I finally Googled the word - only to discover, rather anti-climactically, that it was an acronym for 'For your necessary action please'.

No doubt shortening the phrase was meant to be efficient, but deciphering it probably took me more time than it would have taken the sender of the e-mail to just type those five words.

Still, it seems that brusque communication is the order of the day in today's modern world, where no one can afford the time for actual words anymore.

E-mails have never quite been erudite epistles, but they used to be at least understandable.

Now, with the advent of BlackBerrys and iPhones, and people driving or talking while attempting to write e-mails with their thumbs, they have gone from being terse to being downright incomprehensible.

'Fynap' is by no means the only e-mail shorthand festering out there.

Similar acronyms run the gamut from the slightly better known 'fyi' (for your information), 'fyr' (for your reference) and 'fya' (for your attention), to the relatively arcane 'fyeo' (for your eyes only).

Occasionally, you will get e-mailers who are a bit more communicative. After 'hi' and 'fyi', they sign off with 'Tks n b. rgds.'

I mean, seriously. (Or do I mean 'srsly'?) Is it really so difficult to type the few more letters that are needed to form the coherent message 'Thanks and best regards'?

Surely it wouldn't take that much more effort to convert 'HTH' into 'hope this helps', 'FWIW' into 'for what it's worth', or 'pls rvt tks' into something entirely more grammatical than 'please revert, thanks'.

Sometimes these acronyms can be fun, if you find a good one.

Instead of e-mailing someone to say 'Hi, have a nice day!', for instance, you could just say 'Hi, Hand!'

For maximum impact, you could attach a picture of a hand as well.

On second thought, it would be more efficient to send only the picture - and watch as your recipient tries to figure out what secret society is attempting to communicate with him.

As though this whole shorthand business wasn't confusing enough, it turns out not all acronyms are designed to have each letter represent one word.

A friend of mine once sent off a work e-mail containing some instructions to a business associate, and received the bewildering reply: 'Wilco.'

After spending some time experimenting with various word combinations - What If Lucy Comes Over? When Is Last Court Order? - he finally realised that 'wilco' was a contraction of only two words: 'will comply'.

So this new year, perhaps we could all try to be more lucid and less lazy, and spell out every acronym in full.

Not only would that make us sound more 'port out, starboard home' (supposedly the full meaning of the word 'posh'), we also wouldn't have to call in the grammar International Criminal Police Organisation (Interpol).

I leave it up to you - for your necessary action, please.

fiochan@sph.com.sg

WSJ: Lost in Translation, in the kitchen

January 12, 2011, 11:02 AM HKT

Lost in Translation, in the Kitchen

Lam Thuy Vo/The Wall Street Journal

A chef cuts up ham at L’Atelier de Joel Robuchon.

Inside the kitchen of L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon, all the orders are called out in French: “canard” is duck; “homard” is lobster.

That’s not surprising — it is a French restaurant, after all. But it isn’t in Paris; it’s in Hong Kong, where most of the staff speak Cantonese and English. In fact, 90% of the employees in the kitchen are Hong Kong Chinese, says L’Atelier chef and native-French speaker Michel del Burgo. Another 5% are Japanese, the remaining 5% are French.

In the L’Atelier kitchen, says Sherman Chan, a chef who worked there for a year in 2008: “You say ‘Oui, chef,’ whether or not you understand [the request], and then turn around to ask for a translation. That’s the way it works.” Ms. Chan is a Hong Kong-native who’s mother tongue is Cantonese. She now works in Caprice, another Hong Kong restaurant. “It’s not very efficient, but eventually you learn to make your way around.”

Language is a new problem in Asian kitchens. In the past, when they were staffed mostly by locals, it wasn’t an issue. But a more integrated and international food world — a growing number of Western celebrity chefs in the region and Chinese restaurants expanding overseas — has changed that. Kitchens now are often staffed by an eclectic mix of nationalities.

Every kitchen in the Fook Lam Moon Group, the Cantonese-cuisine restaurant with seven overseas locations — four in Japan and three in China — is headed by a native-Hong Kong, Cantonese-speaking chef. In Japan, roughly 60% of the staff are Cantonese-speakers from Hong Kong, says Fook Lam Moon managing director Michelle Chui, with the remainder split evenly between Japanese and mainland Chinese, who speak Mandarin. So the kitchens in Japan are trilingual — Cantonese, Mandarin and Japanese. In its Hong Kong restaurants, however, all full-time employees speak Mandarin and Cantonese.

“There are no language prerequisites to being hired,” says Ms. Chui. “However, language and cultural differences can be a problem, since we do have instances where there’s misunderstanding amongst staff. Especially in a kitchen, which can have a rather heated atmosphere.”

Of course, some cooking terms transcend language: Classic French sauces, for instance, shouldn’t require a translation.

Says Ms. Chan, “If someone says ‘Béarnaise’ in a French kitchen, the cook needs to know it’s butter, eggs and tarragon…”

But other words are lost in translation. Take “umami,” now commonly known as the “fifth taste,” beyond, sweet, sour, bitter and salty. Working chefs today know what umami is — but ask them to define it in their native language, and they may stumble to find the words.

“In a certain sense, food defies languages — the language of food is taste,” says David Thompson, the executive chef of Thai restaurant Nahm in Bangkok, where Thai is spoken frequently in the kitchen. “But how else will you look deeper into a cuisine and understand how to use ingredients unless you are talking to Thais? And when you talk to Thais, you have to speak in Thai.”

Since moving to Thailand in the 1980s, Mr. Thompson has taught himself to read and write in the language. Today, the chef is fluent — “But I write like a 4-year-old,” he says.

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Copyright 2008 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

FT: A poetic disappearance

Excerpt: As always, hearing literary translators talk about their work reminded me of the immense difficulty, creativity and importance of the task. A literary text is woven in a particular language as intimately as a garment is woven in a particular fabric. Once the fabric is changed, all sorts of minute yet invisible adjustments of tailoring need to be made. The original suit cannot be reproduced in every detail.

===

Source - http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/8cf344c8-0d51-11e0-82ff-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz19DVFqk19

A poetic disappearance

By Harry Eyres

Published: December 23 2010 22:04 | Last updated: December 23 2010 22:04

Illustration by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry from the new Collector’s Library edition of ‘The Little Prince’

Part of the attraction of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince is surely its air of mystery. The tale itself is mysterious – part realistic, the plane and its pilot marooned in the desert; part fanciful, the Prince and his planet and flower – and it ends on the biggest of question marks.

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Naples: a city in need of mercy - Dec-03

In praise of cultivation - Nov-26

Barred from freedom - Nov-19

How far back can we go? - Nov-13

The essence of humanity - Nov-05

But that mystery has been enhanced by the mystery of the author’s death, in a plane crash in 1944 off the French Riviera; fragments of what was probably the plane and a bracelet belonging to Saint-Exupéry were recovered more than 50 years later.

This was not just any old plane crash, but one full of romance: a professional pilot, but too old and injured for active service, the anti-Fascist but also anti-de Gaulle airman had to cajole the Free French authorities to allow him to resume reconnaissance flights. Explanations for the crash have ranged from suicide – Saint-Exupéry was acutely depressed in the months before he died – to downing by a German fighter. Reading his own accounts of flying early passenger planes, you would not discount engine failure.

I have to admit straightaway that I have always – until now – resisted The Little Prince. I would not go so far as Andre Gregory in the film My Dinner with Andre, who found something repulsive, even fascistic, in the tale, but my nose detected a whiff of tweeness. Could the bestselling book ever written in the French language be little more than a flimsy whimsy?

Two new versions – Joann Sfar’s graphic adaptation, translated by Sarah Ardizzone, and a translation by Ros Schwartz – both of which were the subject of a discussion at the French Institute recently, have forced me to reconsider. Even quite radical reimaginings such as Sfar’s seem particularly pertinent because The Little Prince combines its high poetic polish with such an obvious air of incompleteness. My sense is that the work comes out of an agonising tension between a desire for a perpetual childhood, and a recognition of adult ties or commitments, which Saint-Exupéry never resolved – unless he resolved it by pushing the joystick down towards the blue waters of the Med.

But for translators, the questions and problems are not so speculative but eminently practical. How, for example, do you translate that famous opening request by the Little Prince, which in French consists of the words: “S’il vous plaît ... dessine-moi un mouton.”

It sounds simple but mouton in French can mean either sheep or lamb. Sarah Ardizzone and Ros Schwartz, in her beautifully judged Collector’s Library version, come to different conclusions for excellent reasons. Schwartz opts for lamb because “‘Please ... draw me a sheep’ ... was not something I could imagine a child saying spontaneously.” Ardizzone takes the opposite view: “I actually like the plosive, slightly cartoony sound of ‘sheep’. I didn’t want any echoes of ‘lamb of God’ in what is already a spiritually charged text.” Ardizzone’s sheep had another advantage: it enabled her to translate the Pilot’s exasperated “Il me broute avec son mouton celui-là” (literally, “He gets on my nerves with that sheep/lamb of his”) as the brilliant “I wish he’d stop bleating on about his sheep.”

How do you translate another of the Little Prince’s deceptively simple and childlike sayings: “Quand on a terminé sa toilette du matin il faut faire soigneusement la toilette du planète”? Not easy at all. As Schwartz says, “I could think of no single expression in English that worked for both a person and a planet.” Her solution – “Once you’ve brushed your hair and cleaned your teeth, then you clean your planet” – for once doesn’t sound quite right to me, a little too brisk and prosaic, lacking in Saint-Exupéry’s cosmic and ecological resonance.

As always, hearing literary translators talk about their work reminded me of the immense difficulty, creativity and importance of the task. A literary text is woven in a particular language as intimately as a garment is woven in a particular fabric. Once the fabric is changed, all sorts of minute yet invisible adjustments of tailoring need to be made. The original suit cannot be reproduced in every detail.

On the other hand, literary translation is just part of the unending process by which, as Auden put it in his great elegy for Yeats, “the words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living”. The literary tailor-translator cannot copy the original suit, but she or he must come up with a suit for contemporary taste. Who knows, a translator may sometimes improve on the original.

Sfar’s bold graphic reworking, and Ardizzone’s fresh, unsentimental text remove the troublesome whimsy from The Little Prince. Do they also remove some of the mystery? Whereas Saint-Exupéry’s flower hovers on the border between floweriness and capricious femininity, Sfar’s flower is more openly and nakedly seductive. The Pilot-narrator becomes a much more tangible presence than in the original – an improvement, I feel. In one respect, though, Sfar in his concluding drawings deepens the mystery, poetically connecting the Little Prince’s disappearance with the author’s own last flight.

harry.eyres@ft.com

More columns at www.ft.com/eyres

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

WSJ: How Handwriting Trains the Brain

BUSINESS
OCTOBER 5, 2010

How Handwriting Trains the Brain

Forming Letters Is Key to Learning, Memory, Ideas 

By GWENDOLYN BOUNDS

Ask preschooler Zane Pike to write his name or the alphabet, then watch this 4-year-old's stubborn side kick in. He spurns practice at school and tosses aside workbooks at home. But Angie Pike, Zane's mom, persists, believing that handwriting is a building block to learning.

Wendy Bounds discusses the fading art of handwriting, pointing out that new research shows it can benefit children's motor skills and their ability to compose ideas and achieve goals throughout life.

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• Gwendolyn Bounds reports on what your handwriting says about your brain and everything else.

 

She's right. Using advanced tools such as magnetic resonance imaging, researchers are finding that writing by hand is more than just a way to communicate. The practice helps with learning letters and shapes, can improve idea composition and expression, and may aid fine motor-skill development.

It's not just children who benefit. Adults studying new symbols, such as Chinese characters, might enhance recognition by writing the characters by hand, researchers say. Some physicians say handwriting could be a good cognitive exercise for baby boomers working to keep their minds sharp as they age.

Studies suggest there's real value in learning and maintaining this ancient skill, even as we increasingly communicate electronically via keyboards big and small. Indeed, technology often gets blamed for handwriting's demise. But in an interesting twist, new software for touch-screen devices, such as the iPad, is starting to reinvigorate the practice.

Four-year-old Zane Pike used to toss aside his handwriting books. Now, the Cabot, Ark., preschooler is learning to write his letters using a smartphone application.

Most schools still include conventional handwriting instruction in their primary-grade curriculum, but today that amounts to just over an hour a week, according to Zaner-Bloser Inc., one of the nation's largest handwriting-curriculum publishers. Even at institutions that make it a strong priority, such as the private Brearley School in New York City, "some parents say, 'I can't believe you are wasting a minute on this,'" says Linda Boldt, the school's head of learning skills.

Recent research illustrates how writing by hand engages the brain in learning. During one study at Indiana University published this year, researchers invited children to man a "spaceship," actually an MRI machine using a specialized scan called "functional" MRI that spots neural activity in the brain. The kids were shown letters before and after receiving different letter-learning instruction. In children who had practiced printing by hand, the neural activity was far more enhanced and "adult-like" than in those who had simply looked at letters.

"It seems there is something really important about manually manipulating and drawing out two-dimensional things we see all the time," says Karin Harman James, assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Indiana University who led the study.

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• The Juggle: In Digital Age, Does Handwriting Still Matter?

 

Adults may benefit similarly when learning a new graphically different language, such as Mandarin, or symbol systems for mathematics, music and chemistry, Dr. James says. For instance, in a 2008 study in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, adults were asked to distinguish between new characters and a mirror image of them after producing the characters using pen-and-paper writing and a computer keyboard. The result: For those writing by hand, there was stronger and longer-lasting recognition of the characters' proper orientation, suggesting that the specific movements memorized when learning how to write aided the visual identification of graphic shapes.

Other research highlights the hand's unique relationship with the brain when it comes to composing thoughts and ideas. Virginia Berninger, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Washington, says handwriting differs from typing because it requires executing sequential strokes to form a letter, whereas keyboarding involves selecting a whole letter by touching a key.

She says pictures of the brain have illustrated that sequential finger movements activated massive regions involved in thinking, language and working memory—the system for temporarily storing and managing information.

And one recent study of hers demonstrated that in grades two, four and six, children wrote more words, faster, and expressed more ideas when writing essays by hand versus with a keyboard.

View Full Image

AJ Mast for the Wall Street Journal

For research at Indiana University, children undergo specialized MRI brain scans that spot neurological activity.

Even in the digital age, people remain enthralled by handwriting for myriad reasons—the intimacy implied by a loved one's script, or what the slant and shape of letters might reveal about personality. During actress Lindsay Lohan's probation violation court appearance this summer, a swarm of handwriting experts proffered analysis of her blocky courtroom scribbling. "Projecting a false image" and "crossing boundaries," concluded two on celebrity news and entertainment site hollywoodlife.com. Beyond identifying personality traits through handwriting, called graphology, some doctors treating neurological disorders say handwriting can be an early diagnostic tool.

"Some patients bring in journals from the years, and you can see dramatic change from when they were 55 and doing fine and now at 70," says P. Murali Doraiswamy, a neuroscientist at Duke University. "As more people lose writing skills and migrate to the computer, retraining people in handwriting skills could be a useful cognitive exercise."

In high schools, where laptops are increasingly used, handwriting still matters. In the essay section of SAT college-entrance exams, scorers unable to read a student's writing can assign that portion an "illegible" score of 0.

 

Even legible handwriting that's messy can have its own ramifications, says Steve Graham, professor of education at Vanderbilt University. He cites several studies indicating that good handwriting can take a generic classroom test score from the 50th percentile to the 84th percentile, while bad penmanship could tank it to the 16th. "There is a reader effect that is insidious," Dr. Graham says. "People judge the quality of your ideas based on your handwriting."

Handwriting-curriculum creators say they're seeing renewed interest among parents looking to hone older children's skills—or even their own penmanship. Nan Barchowsky, who developed the Barchowsky Fluent Handwriting method to ease transition from print-script to joined cursive letters, says she's sold more than 1,500 copies of "Fix It … Write" in the past year.

Some high-tech allies also are giving the practice an unexpected boost through hand-held gadgets like smartphones and tablets. Dan Feather, a graphic designer and computer consultant in Nashville, Tenn., says he's "never adapted well to the keypads on little devices." Instead, he uses a $3.99 application called "WritePad" on his iPhone. It accepts handwriting input with a finger or stylus, then converts it to text for email, documents or Twitter updates.

And apps are helping Zane Pike—the 4-year-old who refused to practice his letters. The Cabot, Ark., boy won't put down his mom's iPhone, where she's downloaded a $1.99 app called "abc PocketPhonics." The program instructs Zane to draw letters with his finger or a stylus; correct movements earn him cheering pencils.

In children who had practiced writing by hand, the scans showed heightened brain activity in a key area, circled on the image at right, indicating learning took place.

"He thinks it's a game," says Angie Pike.

Similarly, kindergartners at Harford Day School in Bel Air, Md., are taught to write on paper but recently also began tracing letter shapes on the screen of an iPad using a handwriting app.

"Children will be using technology unlike I did, and it's important for teachers to be familiar with it," says Kay Crocker, the school's lead kindergarten teacher. Regardless of the input method, she says, "You still need to be able to write, and someone needs to be able to read it."

Write to Gwendolyn Bounds at wendy.bounds@wsj.com

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

WSJ: Building a More Resilient Brain

IN THE LAB

OCTOBER 12, 2010

Building a More Resilient Brain

• By SHIRLEY S. WANG

A lifetime of speaking two or more languages appears to pay off in old age, with recent research showing the symptoms of dementia can be delayed by an average of four years in bilingual people.

Multilingualism doesn't delay the onset of dementia—the brains of people who speak multiple languages still show physical signs of deterioration—but the process of speaking two or more languages appears to enable people to develop skills to better cope with the early symptoms of memory-robbing diseases, including Alzheimer's.

Scientists for years studied children and found that fluently speaking more than one language takes a lot of mental work. Compared with people who speak only one language, bilingual children and young adults have slightly smaller vocabularies and are slower performing certain verbal tasks, such as naming lists of animals or fruits.

But over time, regularly speaking more than one language appears to strengthen skills that boost the brain's so-called cognitive reserve, a capacity to work even when stressed or damaged. This build-up of cognitive reserve appears to help bilingual people as they age.

"Speaking two languages isn't going to do anything to dodge the bullet" of getting Alzheimer's disease or dementia, says Ellen Bialystok, a bilingualism researcher at York University in Toronto. But greater cognitive reserve means the "same as the reserve tank in a car: Once the brain runs out of fuel, it can go a little farther," she says.

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Specifically, the advantages of bilingualism are thought to be related to a brain function known as inhibitory or cognitive control: the ability to stop paying attention to one thing and focus on something else, says Dr. Bialystok. Fluent speakers of more than one language have to use this skill continually to silence one language in their minds while communicating in another.

The idea of building up cognitive reserve has led to the popular advice that doing crossword puzzles or brain teasers, anything to remain mentally active, helps stave off dementia symptoms. A panel convened by the National Institutes of Health in July cautioned, however, that there isn't enough evidence to conclude that such activities prevent Alzheimer's disease or related dementias.

Researchers don't know whether it is beneficial for people to learn more than one language if one doesn't speak them fluently or nearly every day. The age at which the second language needs to be acquired to yield the protective effect is also unknown.

 

 

Tamar Gollan, a researcher on bilingualism at the University of California San Diego and at the university's Alzheimer's Disease Research Center, says people can, of course, learn a new language if they want to, regardless of age. "But there's no magic point," Dr. Gollan cautions.

Dr. Bialystok began her decades-long research by studying how children learn a second language.

In 2004, she and her colleague Fergus Craik shifted to conduct three studies looking at the cognitive effects in some 150 monolingual and bilingual people between 30 and 80 years old. They found that in both middle and old age, the bilingual subjects were better able to block out distracting information than the single-language speakers in a series of computerized tests. The advantage was even more pronounced in the older subjects.

Dr. Bialystok says other research also shows better performance from bilingual people on tests requiring cognitive control, such as when they are instructed to determine whether a sentence is grammatically correct, even if the content doesn't make sense. For example, in distinguishing, "apples grow on trees" from "apple trees on grow" and "apples grow on noses," the third sentence requires people to focus on the structure and suppress paying attention to the meaning of the words.

The findings from the 2004 study led Dr. Bialystok to wonder whether these benefits might help older people compensate for age-related losses in learning.

She and her colleagues examined the medical records of 228 memory-clinic patients who had been diagnosed with different kinds of dementia, two-thirds with Alzheimer's disease. The results, published in the journal Neuropsychologia in 2007, suggested that bilingual patients exhibit problematic memory problems later than those who only spoke one language.

Bilingual patients were, on average, four years older than single-language speakers when their families first noticed memory problems, or when the patient first came to the clinic seeking treatment.

Moreover, bilingual patients' memories were no worse than those of single-language speakers by the time they arrived at the clinic, and there was no difference in the length of time between the detection of symptoms and when the patients were first checked in.

In a subsequent study, Dr. Bialystok and her colleagues looked at brain images of monolingual and bilingual Alzheimer's patients at the same age and stage of disease. They found that the brains of the bilingual people appeared to be in worse physical condition. This suggests that bilingualism doesn't delay the disease process itself, but rather helps bilingual individuals better handle memory deficits, Dr. Bialystok says.

Their group has confirmed the finding in a further study that will be published later this year, says Dr. Craik, a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute of Baycrest, which is affiliated with the University of Toronto.

Other research, however, complicates the picture of the potential benefits of multilingualism. A recent review of the medical records of some 600 people at a Montreal memory clinic showed a protective benefit for people who were fluent in more than two languages and for bilingual people who learned French before they learned English.

English-only speakers, however, fared just as well as multilingual people who learned English first. This anomaly might be explained by the English-speakers' particular genetics, nutrition, stress levels and environmental exposure, says Howard Chertkow, a cognitive neurologist at Jewish General Hospital in Montreal and a professor at McGill University, one of the authors on the study.

Researchers in Europe, such as Wouter Duyck, a professor at the University of Ghent in Belgium, are also working on similar studies to replicate the effect in other bilingual populations.

Write to Shirley S. Wang at shirley.wang@wsj.com

 

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

FT: Time to spit out more praise for Apple

Time to spit out more praise for Apple

By Lucy Kellaway

Published: September 26 2010 18:14 | Last updated: September 26 2010 18:14

Last week, at the very moment I was writing a column praising Apple for its plain way with words, Steve Jobs was entering into an e-mail exchange with a young woman that took plainness to a whole new level.

Chelsea Isaacs, a student from Long Island University, had got in touch with the Apple press office to get some information about the iPad for a paper she was writing. Six times she tried, but no response. So she e-mailed the chief executive to complain.

“Mr Jobs, I humbly ask why Apple is so wonderfully attentive to the needs of students, whether it be with the latest, greatest invention or the company’s helpful customer service line, and yet, ironically, the media relations department fails to answer any of my questions which are, as I have repeatedly told them, essential to my academic performance.”

Mr Jobs replied: “Our goals do not include helping you get a good grade. Sorry.”

Chelsea composed another long message in which she argued that Apple should have answered out of common courtesy.

This time he responded: “Nope. We have over 300 million users and we can’t respond to their requests unless they involve a problem of some kind. Sorry.”

So she pointed out she was a customer and did have a problem.

He replied: “Please leave us alone.”

It is just possible that Mr Jobs himself didn’t write these e-mails. Indeed, Apple’s media relations department has no more replied to queries on that score than they have to Chelsea’s.

Yet whether he did or not, the world is judging him badly. “Profoundly unhelpful,” says the Guardian. Various Apple-hating readers have gloatingly forwarded the exchange to me, inviting me to swallow my words of praise.

But I’m not going to swallow them. I’m going to spit out some more. Mr Jobs may be a slightly unpleasant piece of work, scary and arrogant. But if these messages are his, I congratulate him on his clarity, his tetchiness and on being entirely in the right.

Chelsea is to be congratulated, too. By goading the head of Apple, she has unwittingly stumbled on a much better topic for a journalistic paper than some nonsense about the iPad.

The first lesson is about brevity. Her initial message was 473 words. His was 12. His words were short and sharp and easy to understand. Hers less so. Even in the one unwieldy sentence quoted above, she makes three elementary mistakes. She uses the word “humble” when she isn’t. She refers to irony when there is none. And sarcasm is always a mistake in an e-mail, especially if you are trying to get your own way.

The next lesson is that it is OK for a CEO to be rude to a customer. The customer need not always be king, especially when he or she is behaving like a spoilt, tiresome brat. So long as the rudeness doesn’t involve a loss of dignity and it isn’t being used, Michael O’Leary-style, as a tiresome stunt to get attention for Ryanair, then it is fine.

Moreover, in this particular case, Mr Jobs’ grumpiness was in the public interest. He was making a vital, though unfashionable, point about priorities. If I were an Apple shareholder I’d be reassured to know that the company’s top priority did not include helping out Chelsea.

The point needs to be made harshly, because modern students simply don’t get it. I often get e-mails from them saying: “I’m doing an essay on marketing. Can you please send me everything you’ve written on this subject?” Next time I’m going to tell them straight: “No, I can’t. It’s not my job.”

When Mr Jobs was a student, if he needed help I daresay he did what we all did back then: ask a teacher, or work it out yourself. But Chelsea’s generation has been duped by the self-esteem movement into believing its development is a matter of general concern, and then duped some more by the internet, which has taught it that the world is democratic and it can have everything right now.

Alas, these beliefs sit so deep, that Mr Jobs’ forceful messages have not struck anywhere near home: Chelsea was last week still indignantly waiting for the busy head of one of the world’s most remarkable companies to say sorry.

“I have nothing against him,” she said magnanimously. “I hope he gives me a call.”

I trust she will have to wait an eternity for that call, and in the meantime will grow up and get a job and discover that working life is not a democracy and there is a hierarchy, and being just a little humble isn’t a bad way to start.

lucy.kellaway@ft.com

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

ST: If only I had taken Chinese seriously...

Think

Home > Think > Story

Sep 19, 2010

If only I had taken Chinese seriously...

By Charissa Yong

Thousands performing exercises at the Forbidden City in Beijing last month. A visitor will have problems appreciating the Forbidden City's grandeur if he cannot fully comprehend the on-site Chinese signboards explaining its history. -- PHOTO: AP

 

Beijing: Recently I decided that I really wanted a time machine, or some time-travel superpowers.

Then I could journey back a few years to knock my younger self on the head and tell her to be serious in her study of Chinese.

The D7 grade I received for my O-level Higher Chinese used to be something I was resignedly proud of. It was a warped badge of honour, proof that I really was as pathetic at the subject as I said.

In kindergarten, I thought ming bai, a phrase the teacher frequently used to ask if we kids understood her instructions, was the colour of a crayon.

I remember doing my valiant best to write a Chinese essay in Secondary 3. I had no idea what 'all-rounded' was in Chinese, and turned to ask my classmate seated next to me. Quan yuan was her joking reply - it literally means 'entirely circular' and is the wrong term - but not knowing better, I dutifully wrote it down. That definitely got everyone laughing at me.

So when I found out I was going to be working in The Straits Times' China bureau in Beijing for six weeks this summer, I was excited, yet horrified.

It was a great opportunity because I had never been to China before, but it also meant I would have to rely solely on my horrendous mother tongue to get by.

English is the language of my thoughts and my tongue, and what my family speaks at home. I grew up on a diet of English storybooks and television programmes, and later fed myself with a whole banquet of English songs. Chinese never really had a chance with me.

In my first week in China, I would choose meals off menus based on whether I could read the Chinese characters, and skip the ones I could not.

Only one person asked me if I was from Singapore. Everyone else wanted to know if I was from Britain or an American-born Chinese, because why else would my spoken Mandarin be so stilted and stuttering? Because I am an ethnic Chinese, I was invisible and could blend into crowds here - right until I opened my mouth. The minute I started talking, everyone knew I was an impostor.

Reporting in an environment where I was severely hampered by my language inadequacies was a great challenge. Half the time, I felt like I could not understand what was going on and had to frantically consult a dictionary. Google's translation tool became my best friend until I banned myself from using it. Nor could I properly express myself, which was incredibly frustrating.

It was also sad. For a story about environmentally friendly burials, I had speak to an elderly Chinese woman whose husband of decades had just died. As the interview ended, I found I had no words that could convey my heartfelt sympathy for her loss.

I had to settle for an apologetic but perfunctory 'I'm sorry to have disturbed you, thank you', and came away from the conversation upset and kicking myself.

Being limited by language was a ghastly feeling. There was so much I wanted to say, but so little were the ways in which I knew how. It felt like my thoughts were trapped within my own mind with no way of being expressed. There was so much I wanted to know, like the histories behind phrases and the nuances of words, and I knew I was missing out on seas of meaning.

A self-defence instructor I interviewed used an idiom to explain to me the significance behind the traditional Chinese martial arts greeting where one's open left palm covers one's fisted right hand. Sadly, it was obvious that I didn't really understand him because I knew very little about the heritage of the language.

The grandeur of the Forbidden City also felt wasted on me because I couldn't fully comprehend the on-site signboards explaining its history.

One Friday night in Houhai, Beijing's Clarke Quay, I sat captivated for hours listening to a musician sing Chinese classics from his soul. I felt helpless because the more beautiful the songs were, the more I wanted to know the stories behind them. But although I heard what he was singing, I didn't know most of what he meant.

Really, I have never wanted to 'speak good Mandarin' as much as I do now. Not because it's cool - although I admit it really is - but because it's a rich, beautiful language, and it is incredibly useful.

All the same, I know that without this short stay in China, I would not have been this interested in learning its language.

Prior to this, I was much more interested in learning Japanese so I could watch my favourite anime episodes without subtitles. It was only when I realised I really liked Chinese song lyrics that I started regretting not being proficient in the language, and it took being thrown into the deep end in China for that regret to blossom into full-fledged remorse.

The irony is that when Chinese lessons were compulsory and easily accessible, I had no interest in them. But now that they are tricky to schedule into my time, I have a genuine desire for them.

I don't know if it's too late, but my time in China has made me really want to try.

charyong@sph.com.sg

The writer is a Singapore Press Holdings scholarship holder who is studying international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She completed a six-week internship with The Straits Times' China Bureau last month.

---

Trapped feeling

Being limited by language was a ghastly feeling...

It felt like my thoughts were trapped within my own mind with no way of being expressed.

FT: Words to describe the glory of Apple

Words to describe the glory of Apple

By Lucy Kellaway

Published: September 19 2010 19:26 | Last updated: September 19 2010 19:26

Like most Brits, I find success in others pretty hard to cope with. When that success is  combined with good looks, I can’t tolerate it at all.

Apple’s continued glory eats away at me like a maggot at my core. I long for it to pick up some bruises. When the iPad came out, I prayed that it would be awful. My prayers were not heard: like all Apple products, it is sleek and gorgeous, and in due course I shall go to one of its wondrous temples of consumption and grumpily buy one.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

Lucy Kellaway: CEOs cry all the way to the bank - Sep-12

Lucy Kellaway: Personal life invasion - Aug-29

Lucy Kellaway: Lust and liquor at work - Aug-15

Lucy Kellaway: Leaders in drivel - Aug-01

Lucy Kellaway: Dud is key to office harmony - Jul-18

Lucy Kellaway: Don’t just dress down on Fridays - Jul-04

Now I find that Apple has succeeded in an area even more revolutionary than designing beautiful products that are easy to use. This time, though, I feel no discomfort. Apple has discovered something that other companies have long forgotten, if they ever knew: language can also be beautiful and easy to use. Words can be fun to read. They can look elegant. They can make you laugh.

Earlier this month it published a set of guidelines for apps sold at its App Store. According to the laws that govern this sort of thing, this document should have been doubly unreadable. It was a list of legal requirements and was aimed at techies. Instead, it was funny and clear, and I found myself reading it effortlessly, even though I barely know what an “app” is.

“We have over 250,000 apps in the App Store. We don’t need any more Fart apps. If your app doesn’t do something useful or provide some form of lasting entertainment, it may not be accepted.”

The tone is direct, comic and elegantly threatening.

“We will reject apps for any content or behaviour that we believe is over the line. What line, you ask? Well, as a Supreme Court Justice once said, I’ll know it when I see it. And we think that you will also know it when you cross it.”

Now compare this to the standard stuff on the Microsoft website. The brand new browser, it says, “delivers a richer, faster, and more business-ready Web experience. Architected to run HTML 5, the beta enables developers to utilise standardised mark-up language across multiple browsers”. Well I never. Reading this, I’m bored and restless, irritated and alienated.

Given the towering superiority of the first linguistic style over the second, will it catch on? Will other companies copy Apple’s language just as they have copied its design?

You might think so. You might think there was a clear commercial advantage to be had in writing clearly and stylishly. But you would be wrong. There is no sign that Microsoft has been suffering from its stolid, dodgy way with words. Indeed it is one of the great mysteries of capitalism that there is no invisible hand that joins good language and good profits. If anything, the hand pushes the two apart.

Even in industries that make their money by selling messages there is no appetite for clarity. Just last week a reader sent me the following sentence from the blog of Bob Jeffrey, the head of JWT, in which he describes what his vast and successful advertising agency does: “Global consumers are rapidly re-evaluating and readjusting their value paradigms and purchasing decisions. Our job is to keep our ear to the ground with these consumers, providing relevant real-time insight to our clients that inspires cutting-edge, cost-efficient solutions.”

The Apple version of this would be something like: “Consumers can change so we try to keep up.” This version reads better, but it is not hard to see why Mr Jeffrey didn’t put it that way. “A relevant real-time insight” sounds like something that a befuddled client might pay more money for.

An even better example of the link between high profits and low language was on the appointments pages in the Financial Times 10 days ago. It was an advertisement from “one of the largest and most trusted banking and financial services organisations in the world” which was hoping to hire a “customer journey re-engineering manager”.

This title contains three layers of obfuscation: the ludicrous yet ubiquitous idea that a banking customer is on a journey; the idea that this journey needs re-engineering; the notion that this needs managing. There is only one conclusion to be drawn: surplus profits generate bonuses and bullshit in equal measure.

The only customers who are really on a journey are those of the transport sector. And as I looked at a collection of them chugging along into Moorgate station last week I thought of another reason why Apple’s brave effort to rehabilitate language won’t catch on. Words are finished. Customers on journeys don’t read. They watch videos on their iPads, iPhones and iPods.

lucy.kellaway@ft.com

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

WSJ: Lost in Translation

LIFE & STYLE

JULY 24, 2010

Lost in Translation

New cognitive research suggests that language profoundly influences the way people see the world; a different sense of blame in Japanese and Spanish

By LERA BORODITSKY

The Gallery Collection/Corbis

The Tower of Babel' by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1563.

Do the languages we speak shape the way we think? Do they merely express thoughts, or do the structures in languages (without our knowledge or consent) shape the very thoughts we wish to express?

Take "Humpty Dumpty sat on a..." Even this snippet of a nursery rhyme reveals how much languages can differ from one another. In English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we say "sat" rather than "sit." In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can't) change the verb to mark tense.

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In Russian, you would have to mark tense and also gender, changing the verb if Mrs. Dumpty did the sitting. You would also have to decide if the sitting event was completed or not. If our ovoid hero sat on the wall for the entire time he was meant to, it would be a different form of the verb than if, say, he had a great fall.

In Turkish, you would have to include in the verb how you acquired this information. For example, if you saw the chubby fellow on the wall with your own eyes, you'd use one form of the verb, but if you had simply read or heard about it, you'd use a different form.

Do English, Indonesian, Russian and Turkish speakers end up attending to, understanding, and remembering their experiences differently simply because they speak different languages?

These questions touch on all the major controversies in the study of mind, with important implications for politics, law and religion. Yet very little empirical work had been done on these questions until recently. The idea that language might shape thought was for a long time considered untestable at best and more often simply crazy and wrong. Now, a flurry of new cognitive science research is showing that in fact, language does profoundly influence how we see the world.

The question of whether languages shape the way we think goes back centuries; Charlemagne proclaimed that "to have a second language is to have a second soul." But the idea went out of favor with scientists when Noam Chomsky's theories of language gained popularity in the 1960s and '70s. Dr. Chomsky proposed that there is a universal grammar for all human languages—essentially, that languages don't really differ from one another in significant ways. And because languages didn't differ from one another, the theory went, it made no sense to ask whether linguistic differences led to differences in thinking.

Use Your Words

Some findings on how language can affect thinking.

• Russian speakers, who have more words for light and dark blues, are better able to visually discriminate shades of blue.
• Some indigenous tribes say north, south, east and west, rather than left and right, and as a consequence have great spatial orientation.
• The Piraha, whose language eschews number words in favor of terms like few and many, are not able to keep track of exact quantities.
• In one study, Spanish and Japanese speakers couldn't remember the agents of accidental events as adeptly as English speakers could. Why? In Spanish and Japanese, the agent of causality is dropped: "The vase broke itself," rather than "John broke the vase."

The search for linguistic universals yielded interesting data on languages, but after decades of work, not a single proposed universal has withstood scrutiny. Instead, as linguists probed deeper into the world's languages (7,000 or so, only a fraction of them analyzed), innumerable unpredictable differences emerged.

Of course, just because people talk differently doesn't necessarily mean they think differently. In the past decade, cognitive scientists have begun to measure not just how people talk, but also how they think, asking whether our understanding of even such fundamental domains of experience as space, time and causality could be constructed by language.

For example, in Pormpuraaw, a remote Aboriginal community in Australia, the indigenous languages don't use terms like "left" and "right." Instead, everything is talked about in terms of absolute cardinal directions (north, south, east, west), which means you say things like, "There's an ant on your southwest leg." To say hello in Pormpuraaw, one asks, "Where are you going?", and an appropriate response might be, "A long way to the south-southwest. How about you?" If you don't know which way is which, you literally can't get past hello.

About a third of the world's languages (spoken in all kinds of physical environments) rely on absolute directions for space. As a result of this constant linguistic training, speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes. They perform navigational feats scientists once thought were beyond human capabilities. This is a big difference, a fundamentally different way of conceptualizing space, trained by language.

Differences in how people think about space don't end there. People rely on their spatial knowledge to build many other more complex or abstract representations including time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality and emotions. So if Pormpuraawans think differently about space, do they also think differently about other things, like time?

To find out, my colleague Alice Gaby and I traveled to Australia and gave Pormpuraawans sets of pictures that showed temporal progressions (for example, pictures of a man at different ages, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. When asked to do this, English speakers arrange time from left to right. Hebrew speakers do it from right to left (because Hebrew is written from right to left).

Pormpuraawans, we found, arranged time from east to west. That is, seated facing south, time went left to right. When facing north, right to left. When facing east, toward the body, and so on. Of course, we never told any of our participants which direction they faced. The Pormpuraawans not only knew that already, but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time. And many other ways to organize time exist in the world's languages. In Mandarin, the future can be below and the past above. In Aymara, spoken in South America, the future is behind and the past in front.

In addition to space and time, languages also shape how we understand causality. For example, English likes to describe events in terms of agents doing things. English speakers tend to say things like "John broke the vase" even for accidents. Speakers of Spanish or Japanese would be more likely to say "the vase broke itself." Such differences between languages have profound consequences for how their speakers understand events, construct notions of causality and agency, what they remember as eyewitnesses and how much they blame and punish others.

In studies conducted by Caitlin Fausey at Stanford, speakers of English, Spanish and Japanese watched videos of two people popping balloons, breaking eggs and spilling drinks either intentionally or accidentally. Later everyone got a surprise memory test: For each event, can you remember who did it? She discovered a striking cross-linguistic difference in eyewitness memory. Spanish and Japanese speakers did not remember the agents of accidental events as well as did English speakers. Mind you, they remembered the agents of intentional events (for which their language would mention the agent) just fine. But for accidental events, when one wouldn't normally mention the agent in Spanish or Japanese, they didn't encode or remember the agent as well.

In another study, English speakers watched the video of Janet Jackson's infamous "wardrobe malfunction" (a wonderful nonagentive coinage introduced into the English language by Justin Timberlake), accompanied by one of two written reports. The reports were identical except in the last sentence where one used the agentive phrase "ripped the costume" while the other said "the costume ripped." Even though everyone watched the same video and witnessed the ripping with their own eyes, language mattered. Not only did people who read "ripped the costume" blame Justin Timberlake more, they also levied a whopping 53% more in fines.

Beyond space, time and causality, patterns in language have been shown to shape many other domains of thought. Russian speakers, who make an extra distinction between light and dark blues in their language, are better able to visually discriminate shades of blue. The Piraha, a tribe in the Amazon in Brazil, whose language eschews number words in favor of terms like few and many, are not able to keep track of exact quantities. And Shakespeare, it turns out, was wrong about roses: Roses by many other names (as told to blindfolded subjects) do not smell as sweet.

Patterns in language offer a window on a culture's dispositions and priorities. For example, English sentence structures focus on agents, and in our criminal-justice system, justice has been done when we've found the transgressor and punished him or her accordingly (rather than finding the victims and restituting appropriately, an alternative approach to justice). So does the language shape cultural values, or does the influence go the other way, or both?

Languages, of course, are human creations, tools we invent and hone to suit our needs. Simply showing that speakers of different languages think differently doesn't tell us whether it's language that shapes thought or the other way around. To demonstrate the causal role of language, what's needed are studies that directly manipulate language and look for effects in cognition.

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• discuss

“ That language embodies different ways of knowing the world seems intuitive, given the number of times we reach for a word or phrase in another language that communicates that certain je ne sais quoi we can't find on our own. ”

—Steve Kallaugher

One of the key advances in recent years has been the demonstration of precisely this causal link. It turns out that if you change how people talk, that changes how they think. If people learn another language, they inadvertently also learn a new way of looking at the world. When bilingual people switch from one language to another, they start thinking differently, too. And if you take away people's ability to use language in what should be a simple nonlinguistic task, their performance can change dramatically, sometimes making them look no smarter than rats or infants. (For example, in recent studies, MIT students were shown dots on a screen and asked to say how many there were. If they were allowed to count normally, they did great. If they simultaneously did a nonlinguistic task—like banging out rhythms—they still did great. But if they did a verbal task when shown the dots—like repeating the words spoken in a news report—their counting fell apart. In other words, they needed their language skills to count.)

All this new research shows us that the languages we speak not only reflect or express our thoughts, but also shape the very thoughts we wish to express. The structures that exist in our languages profoundly shape how we construct reality, and help make us as smart and sophisticated as we are.

Language is a uniquely human gift. When we study language, we are uncovering in part what makes us human, getting a peek at the very nature of human nature. As we uncover how languages and their speakers differ from one another, we discover that human natures too can differ dramatically, depending on the languages we speak. The next steps are to understand the mechanisms through which languages help us construct the incredibly complex knowledge systems we have. Understanding how knowledge is built will allow us to create ideas that go beyond the currently thinkable. This research cuts right to the fundamental questions we all ask about ourselves. How do we come to be the way we are? Why do we think the way we do? An important part of the answer, it turns out, is in the languages we speak.

—Lera Boroditsky is a professor of psychology at Stanford University and editor in chief of Frontiers in Cultural Psychology.

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

ST: 'No English, no job'

Asia

Home > Asia > Asia > Story

Jul 9, 2010

'No English, no job'

Firms expanding abroad wise up to the value of global business language

'It's about stopping being a Japanese company. We will become a world company.'

Mr Hiroshi Mikitani, CEO of Japan's biggest online retailer, Rakuten, at a news conference in Tokyo last week. The conference was conducted almost entirely in English

Some Japanese retailers are putting in place measures to make the use of English more common in the workplace. -- PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS

TOKYO: In a bid to plug dwindling domestic consumption by tapping into overseas markets, some of Japan's big-name retailers are telling their employees to start speaking English - or find another job.

As Japan's population shrinks, the country's retailers are increasingly looking to boost sales by expanding abroad and some are waking up to the necessity of being able to speak the global language of business in order to succeed overseas.

Rakuten, Japan's biggest online retailer, plans to make English the firm's official language, while Fast Retailing, operator of the Uniqlo apparel chain, wants to make English more common in its offices by 2012 and plans to test its employees for proficiency. 'It's about stopping being a Japanese company. We will become a world company,' Rakuten chief executive officer Hiroshi Mikitani said last week at a news conference here - conducted almost entirely in English.

Rakuten, which recently acquired France's largest e-commerce site, PriceMinister, and the No. 3 in the United States, Buy.com, aims to expand into 27 countries over the coming years. The company hopes that overseas sales will eventually account for 70 per cent of all transactions made through its websites.

Employees at Rakuten will need to master English by 2012 to avoid facing the sack. 'No English, no job,' Mr Mikitani told the Asahi newspaper.

Other high-profile Japanese companies, including carmakers Toyota Motor and Nissan Motor, have announced moves to make the use of English more common in the workplace.

Some experts say the switch to English is healthy but just one of the changes firms need to make to go global.

'What's interesting is that these companies really stand out as pioneers,' said Professor Jeff Kingston, director of Asian Studies at Temple University's Japanese campus. 'They realise that Japan is going to need to strike into foreign markets, given the dormant state of its economy.'

Fast Retailing plans to broaden its consumer base by expanding into Malaysia and Taiwan later this year. To keep up with its internationalisation, employees at Uniqlo's head office will need to score at least 700 out of 990 on the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC), a measure of proficiency.

Many employees may struggle to make the grade. On average, Japanese candidates perform worse than those from almost any other Asian country in English aptitude tests, according to a report published by the Educational Testing Service.

Japanese tied with those from Tajikistan to finish joint 29th out of the 30 Asian countries surveyed last year.

But Fast Retailing has no plans as yet to provide extra training to help staff meet new English language expectations. 'How (employees) choose to meet these expectations is a personal choice,' its spokesman Daisuke Hase said in English.

Prof Kingston said, however, that the trend towards using English in office life was hardly likely to sweep the nation.

In fact, Mr Yoichi Wada, president of videogame creator Square Enix, tweeted an alternative this week. 'Rather than make English the office language, let's use 'C',' he wrote - a reference to a computer programming language.

REUTERS

Non Sequitur: Bar and Grill

Pun intended! Heh :)

Boing Boing: Seeing Languages Differently

Source: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/06/27/seeing-languages-dif.html

Seeing Languages Differently

Mike Shaughnessy at 10:13 AM Sunday, Jun 27, 2010

Guestblogger Dr. Michael Shaughnessy is a German professor who specializes in computer assisted language learning and visual representations of culture at Washington & Jefferson College. He is the director of the CAPL project to provide free CC licensed media to language and culture instructors worldwide.

How we see the world impacts our use of language and our use of language impacts how we see the world. Cognitive scientists in the vein of Benjamin Whorf regularly investigate the connections to thought and language use, including how visual perception varies across languages. Since I use (authentic) visual media to assist in foreign language acquisition, my research does have a practical side to the normally impenetrable fields of visual cognition and psycholinguistics. I use photographs at the earliest stages of language learning to train the brain not only in the use of new words, but literally how to "see" in the new language. Seeing a language differently embeds that language into a visual cultural context for the learner and makes for more effective recall later.

Let's look at two aspects of the visual world that provide good examples of how the visual impacts language and vary between languages and cultures: Color & Space.

Color

In order to highlight how color perceptions vary among cultures, I like to use the example of how we linguistically categorize certain colors. Let's take the range of colors in what we call "blue" and "red" in English.

When you look at the following colors, typical native English speaking respondents will describe these two colors as existing with the range of colors we call "blue".

Conversely, the following two colors here represent two distinct color categories in English, namely "red" and "pink"

If one looks at other languages, this same categorization scheme is not evident. For example, the blues above are distinct color categories in Russian. Plain or dark blue (синий, siniy) is a distinct color from light blue (голубой, goluboy). Each of these color categories has its own associated meanings, invoking a specific thought for many Russians. In Moscow, there are separate blue lines on the city metro system which helped me finally learn the difference between синий & голубой . Winawer and other at MIT take a close look at this subject in "Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination." (2007) For the red & pink example, there is a correlating opposite in Chinese. The color distinction is not as prevalent as the colors are in the same category linguistically. Red is 红 (hóng) and pink as 粉红, (fěn hóng) or literally "powder red", a linguistic derivation similar to 'light-blue' in English. Where Russian blues are distinct, so are the Reds in English, but in Chinese, they are linguistically related.

The Winawer study takes this a step further. What does it mean for the function of our brain when we categorize what we see in different ways? They show that Russian concepts of blue affect visual performance, particularly on the language users' ability to discriminate between colors.

They state " ... our results suggest that language-specific distortions in perceptual performance arise as a function of the interaction of lower level perceptual processing and higher level knowledge systems (e.g. language)."

This insight/observation points towards a direct connection between the language one speaks and the functionality of the visual cortex and the brain. In other words, the vocabulary you use and how you categorize the world affects the speed at which you brain can recall certain information through your optic nerves. They also hint that left brain hemisphere tasks may be affected by language and visual perception as this is the hemisphere of the brain where language and logical performance is organized. Interestingly enough, this is switched in infants as visual perception is not yet attached to a language center. Apparently, babies see color purely as what they see is not filtered through the lens of language. I am not sure what it means to see a color "purely", but the Color label wheel from Dolores Labs provides an interesting look at color perceptions within the English language.

Space

In addition to color, spatial perception varies among cultures according to researchers. These differences in how we perceive space (eg. size, distance, depth, and direction, etc) lead to corresponding linguistic differences manifested in the words we use to describe our surroundings in different language. This lens of language here affects how we perceive and feel about our surroundings. One might easily imagine how a phrase like "that is a large house", "it is within walking distance", or "it is located off to the right" would vary in meaning between cultures, but there are more subtle and stark differences in how we perceive space differently. The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics has several examples of cultural variances. Researcher Steven C. Levinson has interesting insights and states that in "...many cultures (as suggested by at least a third of the small sample) spatial conception is organized in a fundamentally different way than expected on the basis of familiar western languages."

According to Levinson, a linguistic example can be found in the lack of spatial descriptors as in front of, in back, left of, and right of. Some languages instead use absolute terms or "fixed" cardinal direction such as north, south, upstream, downstream that are irrelevant of the direction of the speaker.

Perhaps it is that certain languages are less ego-centric, linguistically speaking, and focus more on cardinal directions. Apparently, the only universal content in regards to spatial perception in language appears to be the direction 'up' since it is a function of the gravity that we all feel, regardless of our cultural or linguistic background.

Geography, culture, and even technology shape how we view space in our world. In addition to variance among cultures, there is constant change within languages. Additionally, it is not solely a function of this 'lens of language'; it is both a function of our language and our experiences. For example, the exposure to mathematics and science has an impact on how we perceive space.

The following figures represent some classic optical illusions to demonstrate examples of how cultures perceive length differently. In the first image, the question is "which center line is longer?

In the second image, the question is whether the blue line is longer than the red.

In both cases, the lines are the same length, we only perceive them to be different lengths; an optical illusion. Interestingly enough, these optical illusions are only perceptible by members of traditional 'western cultures'. Segall, et al. in "The Influence of Culture on Visual Perception " wrote in 1968 that susceptibility to optical illusion is, indeed, a culturally determined factor. Their experiments conclude that the "European and American samples made significantly more illusions-supported responses than did the non-Western samples."

I use these examples of visual differences between cultures to highlight the point that the visual impacts language, and if you use media to teach a language, you need to use authentic media. Clip art and generic stock photography don't take advantage of the benefits of media in learning. Many language learning software developers use inauthentic images, stock photos, or clip art simply because of cost issues. A full description of the design problems in language learning software can be found in my 2003 article: CALL, commercialism and culture: inherent software design conflicts and their results ReCALL, 2003 - Cambridge Univ Press. In the mean time, I will continue to ponder how what I see affects how I think and how I think in a given language affects how I see.

WSJ: Finding the Words for Wine

ON WINE

JUNE 26, 2010

Finding the Words for Wine

Amateur enthusiasts often end up tongue-tied. How to be eloquent and exact

By LETTIE TEAGUE

Illustration by Joel Holland

A friend of mine maintains a veritable library of self-improvement guides—though no book of his may be better thumbed than "30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary." I was glancing through his copy recently (and found the chapter "Words for Human Faults" to be surprisingly short) when the thought occurred to me: Why wasn't there an equivalent text for wine? There is likely no beverage whose procurement and pleasure is more descriptor-dependent. After all, I've enjoyed wine without food many times but I've never tasted a wine that was unaccompanied by words.

Ten Worthwhile Wine Words

The following 10 words are simple, straightforward and readily understandable. I've also listed the wine(s) that you're likely to be offered by a sommelier or retailer if you use them to describe the wine.

Crisp—a fresh, bright generally young wine with perceptible acidity. Wines like Sauvignon Blanc (from all over the world) and Italian whites like Vermentino, Verdicchio and Arneis fall into this category, as well as Alabarinos from Spain and Chablis from France.

Fruity—a wine with a pronounced fruit flavors and aromas that may be completely dry or "off-dry" (which is to say "perceived as sweet.") Rieslings, Muscats and Gewurztraminers are among the fruitiest wines and Zinfandel and Gamay are among the fruitiest reds.

Grassy—a wine with an herbal character; a classic term to describe Sauvignon Blanc.

Hearty—this is a word used almost exclusively to describe red wines like Syrahs and Malbecs that are fairly substantial in terms of structure and tannins.

Oaky—this is pretty much as it sounds; an oaky wine has a pronounced oak character. It's most often used to describe Chardonnay and Cabernet, though it could describe any wine where the oak is the most dominant feature.

Rich—wines that are viscous, weighty and lush like Chardonnay and Viognier are generally referred to as "rich," as are reds with a lot of extract and flavor like Cabernet, Syrah and Merlot.

Soft—wines that are round and fairly fruity with low or well-integrated tannins and fairly low acidity. The word applies to certain whites, such as Semillon, and reds, such as Gamay and Grenache.

Spicy—this word is associated with the Syrah grape ("peppery" is another) that's grown in the Rhone Valley, Australia and various parts of the world including California and Washington.

Supple—this is usually what people mean when they say they like a "smooth" wine. It's applicable to wines with fairly soft tannins and texture such as a Pinot Noir.

Velvety—this word is all about texture. It generally characterizes a wine that is rich and supple as well. See suggestions above for "supple" and "rich."

And yet, for many wine drinkers, it's hard to know which words to use. There are analytical terms like tannic and extract that reference a wine's structure and flavor, associative terms that call up vegetables and fruits and of course, there's the sort of pretentious verbiage that has inspired so many New Yorker cartoons. The most famous may be the Thurber drawing that depicts a man announcing to his guests, "It's just a naive domestic Burgundy without any breeding but I think you'll be amused by its presumption."

The language of wine is so complex it has been the focus of accomplished linguists such as Adrienne Lehrer of the University of Arizona, who has puzzled over the subject for many years (and occasionally invoked that same Thurber cartoon). Dr. Lehrer tackled the language of wine most recently in a chapter called "Can Wines Be Brawny?" in "Questions of Taste: The Philosophy of Wine," a collection of essays published by Oxford University Press in 2007. As a linguist, Dr. Lehrer explained to me in an email that she wanted to figure out how a word like "feminine" could be understood when linked with a wine described as "light and graceful." And, she added in a note I found endearingly optimistic, she thought many new wine descriptors were created by wine writers who "don't want to keep using the same words over and over" while gamely "trying to produce lively prose."

Of course it's all very well for academics to ponder such matters or wine writers to torture a few new terms into life while toiling over less-than-lively prose…but what does the language of wine actually sound like in restaurants and stores? What are the wine words that real people employ?

"Smooth," answered Joe Salamone, the wine buyer of Crush Wine & Spirits in Manhattan, almost immediately when I posed the question. "It's the word that people use the most often to describe the kind of wine that they want." Except, Mr. Salamone added, it's also the most meaningless. "Smooth is such a relative term."

"Without a bite" is another customer favorite that can mean any number of things, he said. "People will ask for a wine that 'doesn't have a bite.' It's hard to figure that out. And dry. And sweet. Most people don't know the difference between a fruity wine and one that is actually sweet." I knew what he meant; the minute I've characterized a wine (i.e., Riesling, Viognier) as "fruity" to a friend, I've experienced an almost visceral recoil. "Not fruity!" my friend would say in horror. So what wines did Mr. Salamone recommend to someone who wanted a biteless wine or one that was smooth? (And weren't they the same thing?) "I usually suggest a California Chardonnay or Pinot Noir," he replied.

Oenofile

Wines that are easy to describe—and easy to love

2008 Christian Moreau Chablis, $26

Bright, penetrating, flinty white from a top Chablis producer.

2008 Au Bon Climat Chardonnay Santa Maria, $24

Rich yet subtle and beautifully balanced Santa Barbara Chardonnay.

2009 Mount Nelson Sauvignon Blanc Marlborough, $16

Lively, refreshing, crisp, almost tangy New Zealand white.

2008 Altare Barbera, $26

Vivid, juicy, intense red from a great Piemontese producer.

2008 Foxen Pinot Noir Santa Maria Valley, $34

Velvety, supple aromatic Pinot from northern Santa Barbara.

Were there wine words he avoided, words that might kill a sale? "I stay away from 'acidity,' " he replied. "I use a word like 'crisp' instead. Or 'rich' and 'full-bodied' and 'spicy.' That's a word everyone likes." But he never used too many of them at the same time. "The fewer words, the better," Mr. Salamone said.

Bernard Sun, the corporate beverage director of the Jean-Georges Vongerichten restaurant empire (20 restaurants in 13 cities to date) told me much the same thing; in fact, he said, he keeps the word count to five when talking about wine. "You don't want to overwhelm someone with words," he said. And what were the words that his customers liked to hear? " 'Spicy' is a good word," said Mr. Sun. "And 'elegant.' Or you could say a wine has 'a beautiful finish.' " White wines, he added, were easier to describe than reds. "It's a lot more complicated to talk about reds, because it's not just one grape, one flavor, but often blends of different grapes and multiple flavors." Both Mr. Sun and Mr. Salamone said they found Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc easy to describe. Words like "rich" and "full-bodied" applied to Chardonnay, while "light" and "crisp" effectively conveyed the nature of Sauvignon Blanc. (Mr. Salamone also favored Arneis, a crisp white wine from the Piedmont region of Italy.)

But don't most shoppers read the back labels of bottles for guidance? Not really, said Mr. Salamone. In fact, when I was shopping at Crush I realized I was the only one turning the bottles around. Perhaps the reason that so few people took the time to read labels was that their word count was rather high. Most labels ran well over 100 words—and most of the time it wasn't exactly inspiring prose. There were often a few lines about the winery's history, the vineyard geography and perhaps a bit about winemaking technique (the type of oak barrel was frequently cited). The word "balanced" showed up a lot, too. But there were only a few short notes about the wine's flavors and aroma. In fact, I was surprised at how few back labels described the wine's taste. Did the winemaker (or more likely, the winery's marketing department) find it hard to put into words?

One bottle had lots of words on both front and back labels: Penfolds Grange, the legendary Shiraz-Cabernet blend from Australia. It's not only one of the world's greatest wines, but it sports possibly the world's wordiest label. I counted 137 words on the front label of my 2001 Grange and almost as many words on the back. The front label detailed the wine's history and that of its founding winemaker Max Schubert, while the back label described the vintage and gave helpful suggestions about decanting to "stimulate and enliven the wine." Did all those words help sell it? "Not really," said Matt Lane, director of wine education for Penfolds Americas. "I mean, it's Grange, that's why it sells. We like to say that Grange has one of the worst wine labels in the world. But we have no plans to change it." (The only time people probably read the label, Mr. Lane added, was once they'd already bought the wine.)

But if labels aren't really being read and retailers and restaurateurs are editing their descriptions of wine down to five words or fewer, a word-challenged wine lover might have a hard time ever improving his or her vocabulary. Mary Ewing-Mulligan, president of the International Wine Center in New York and a leading wine educator for over three decades, had a three-step suggestion. First, she said, it was necessary to become a thoughtful taster and "smeller." In other words, pay attention to everything—to which I'd add, "Write it down." It's always easier to remember words on paper than words that are said. (But as a writer I have a vested interest in believing this, of course.) Secondly, said Ms. Ewing-Mulligan, it was important to experience a wide range of wines from different places and grapes that had a variety of textures and flavors. Thirdly, a person should taste wines with an experienced taster and try using his or her vocabulary. And perhaps take a wine course.

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I believe that budding wine mavens can't get started building their vinous vocabularies soon enough—even before they're eligible to drink. Toward that end, perhaps wine terms could be introduced at school spelling bees. After all, this year's Scripps National Spelling Bee featured lots of food words, like "gnocchi," "basmati," "mesclun" and "prosciutto." If they were worthy of inclusion, why not "varietal" and "tannic," maybe even "Champagne"? I called Paige P. Kimble, the Scripps National Spelling Bee director, to make the suggestion. Could I suggest a few wine-related words for the 2011 National Bee? Ms. Kimble politely demurred. Apparently, it wasn't possible to simply call up and suggest words. "The way we determine our list is mysterious," she said mysteriously. "We have people who recommend words to us," she added, without further specifying just who those "people" might be.

Had wine words ever been included in a bee? Ms. Kimble thought for a minute. There had been a few. One that came to mind was "Chianti." And "connoisseur." " 'Connoisseur' is one of the most-offered words in our competitions. It's the third or fourth in all spelling competitions across the country," she noted. It's also on page 74 of my friend's vocabulary book, with this accompanying definition: "A critical judge of excellence in the arts, food, drink and women." Presumably with a good vocabulary, too.

Write to Lettie Teague at wine@wsj.com