The Power and the Money

Observatorio argentino 39 and How to swear in Argentine 3: What I learned in the last 24 hours

First, everybody hates Carlos Menem. The Cronista ran a weird poll asking which Argentine administration since 1983 has been the most democratic. The answers make no sense, as befitting a question which makes no sense. But Carlos Memem managed to get only 5% of votes, followed by Fernando de la Rúa at 3%. And to be fair, De la Rúa was really stuck cleaning up Menem’s mess. 

Second, down in Neuquén City, native Mapuche demonstrators have occupied a national park and blocked roads. The reason is that the the national oil company, YPF, wants to drill on their land. The Mapuche asked for 3.8 million pesos per well ... about US$136,000, for wells that cost seven to fifteen million dollars.

The city government countered with ... zero. Actually, they outdid Michael Corleone: they offered the expropriation of Mapuche lands without any restitution. Now, these are not lands governed by vague traditional laws ... we are talking a 125 acre plot (about thirty New York City blocks) given to the Mapuche by the previous mayoral administration in the far off year of 2011. This did not stop Mayor Horacio “Pechi” Quiroga from saying, with great exasperation, “If the lands were theirs, they would have private titles!”

Third, Argentine Spanish has diverged from the rest of the world to the point of having their own conjugations. Consider the following from the Buenos Aires subway: “Registrá tu tarjeta.” Go ahead. Explain that conjugation to me. I dare you.

Finally, if an Argentine tells you that somebody is “saliendo con los tapones de punta,” it literally means that they are “leaving with their cleats in the ground.” Which makes no sense, even for a soccer player. But imagine that you are putting your cleats in the ground preparing to launch yourself at an opponent. Somebody who has “los tapones de punta” is ready to beat the shit out of you ... and if they are “saliendo con los tapones de punta” then they are “coming out swinging,” whether literally or figuratively. If literally, get your dukes up or run away you idiot, run away!!!! And if figuratively, gird yourself for battle however is appropriate.

Good night from Buenos Aires.

How to swear in Argentine 2: “Hacer boleta” o “ser boleta”

Literally, “hacer boleta” is just an odd way of saying “design a ballot” or “print out a ticket.” The other expression in the title, “ser boleta” makes no sense at all, unless you happen to be a ticket.

In Argentina, however, both expressions mean  “to be killed,” in the same colorful way that a New Yorker of a certain age might say “get your ticket punched.” 

I have no idea what is the origin of the American expression, but in Argentina nobody appears to have used it before 1969. That year, probably not coincidentally, saw the first violent reactions to the repression of Juan Carlos Onganía’s dictatorship. People started to receive threats “te van a hacer boleta” which morphed into “si no cumplís, sos boleta.” 

For what it is worth, “sos boleta” is now official. The Real Academia Española (pictured above) has recognized it as a legitimate Spanish expression! So use it in good conscience ... although you cannot really have a good conscience if you need to use it. 

How to swear in Argentine 1: Irse a las piñas

I should and will write more about the Mexican elections and the future of Pemex. Especially given the food for thought Andrei Gomberg presented here! 

Instead, though, I want to write about swearing in Argentina. In my travels to and around that country I have often found myself utterly dumbfounded by what people are trying to tell me. I understand the words, but the sentences just don’t make any sense. So therefore we begin a new series: “How to swear in Argentine.”

We begin with “irse a las piñas,” which does not mean,  terrible Guardian translation notwithstanding, “go to the pineapples.” I don’t  mean that the translation is terrible because the expression is figurative; I mean simply that “piña” does not mean “pineapple” in Argentine. For some reason, the word for pineapple in Argentine is “ananá”; “piña” is “pinecone.”

Which makes more sense when you consider that “irse a las piñas” means “come to blows” or “have it out” or “step” or “throw down.” And since pinecones are not something that Argentines talk about particularly much (save Christmastime) other than in the context of “going to,” there is never going to be any confusion.

So if two people in a Pilar bar start whaling on each other, now you know how to describe it. 

Code switching

On the Red Line home there were three teenagers, two female, one male. I have never heard anyone switch so fluently between English and French. Multiple times per sentence. The English was from the DMV. The French was not from Quebec; 100% for that. Now, I do not know if the French was from the Hexagon or Côte d’Ivoire or the West Indies, but it was native and how did they switch in the middle of a sentence? I was impressed. More so because their English accent was unaffected. I wish I had been there with a native French speaker. 

I have heard and spoken much Spanglish in my life. This was a whole nother level. 

New York accents and social class

I am finishing Chris Hayes’ A Colony in a Nation. It’s quite good, but the parts that really resonated were his descriptions of growing up in the New York City in the 1980s and 1990s. It turns out he grew up in Norwood, moved to Riverdale as a teen, and went to a private school Hunter College High School around 96th Street on 94th Street in Manhattan. He then went to Brown University.

This, for no particular reason, is a picture of Brooklyn:

Anyway, I mention Hayes’ sojourn in Riverdale and his educational pedigree because they explain his complete lack of a New York accent. And I mean complete. Hayes has nothing, not the nasality, certainly not the /ɔː/ → [ɔə~oə~ʊə] “low back chain shift.” (That shift is what Russell Crowe keeps getting glaringly annoyingly wrong in all of this otherwise spot-on portrayals of white working-class New Yorkers. See minute 1:12. But why? It ain’t hard.) 

He doesn’t even have the watered-down but clearly New York speech of Harry Enten. Or me. Or the President.

But it is no surprise that Chris Hayes has a general American accent: of course somebody with that education — and who lived in Riverdale and hung out on the Upper East Side — would speak television!

But then I discover that the famous Robert Caro grew up on the Upper West Side and was educated at Horace Mann and Princeton. Yet he has a pronounced New York accent. It is frankly impossible to imagine somebody from a rich family in that neighborhood and with that education sounding like Robert Caro today.

So one of three things must be true:

1. Robert Caro is the honey badger. Robert Caro just don’t care. 
2. Robert Caro is a mensch but it was just harder to lose a Noo Yawk accent back then. This I do not believe for a second.
3. New York accents had less stigma attached to them in the 1950s than they did in the 1990s. 

The regional accent is not dead yet, especially in its latest form (or in New Jersey) but it ain’t what it used to be. 

Escapism: A 19th-Century science fiction novel and a 21st-Century science fiction TV series

 First, this is the weirdest thing that I have ever read. It’s a science fiction novel from 1889. It’s badly-written. (I mean, it’s badly-written for 1889. For comparison, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court was published around the same time.) The technological extrapolations are weird and wrong and barely affect the plot, which concerns bizarre machinations around the succession to the British Empire and some weird-ass scheme where the President of the United States is trying to marry off her daughter to the Emperor. It ends with Canada beating the U.S. in a war.

Anyway. Why did I read it? Well, besides insomnia most of the major characters are women, and women who were not trying to impress a man. That is pathetically rare, even today, let alone 1889. Plus the author went out of his way to point out all the awesome people in the book who just also happened to be Jewish. For something so old-fashioned, it was also strikingly modern.

Second, I finished watching Occupied on Netflix. I recommend it! The main scenario is improbable, but slightly significantly less so than before November 8th. An energy-independent U.S. has pulled out of NATO and established a valued relationship with the Russian Federation. In the midst of a massive surge in energy prices prompted by wars in the Middle East, a Green government in Norway decides to shut down the country’s oil and gas production in order to combat climate change. Panicky Europeans green-light a Russian seizure of the Norwegian fields to restart production. The Norwegian prime minister reluctantly allows this in order to avoid a war, but his county finds itself entrapped in a slow-motion conquest as the Russians slowly assume more-and-more authority. 

It is quite well done. My only quibble? Well, whoever plays the American ambassador to Norway has a Canadian accent. You know, with that weird caught=cot sound you can hear from Justin Trudeau. Given that a pretty massive plurality of Canadians don’t have a recognizable Canadian accent, it’s an impressive bit of miscasting. (If somebody finds out that the actor who plays the ambassador is actually from Massachusetts, I will be embarrassed.)

The accent screw-up is all the more inexplicable considering how good British and Australian actors have gotten at mimicking spot-on American accents, even American regional accents.

But not Russell Crowe. See minute 1:12 in this clip from an otherwise great movie. Points to the person who guesses the word he screws up in the context of getting everything else right. The mess-up is all the more pronounced considering as he is in a scene with Denzel Washington, who has a perfect New York accent considering as that is how he naturally talks.

Actually, a television show about a Russian occupation of Norway might not be all that escapist these days, considering. 

You say Cuba, I say Cuber, an if you disagree go f@$€ y'self

 So, we are in the hunt for South Bronx real estate. And what do you know? An advertisement declaring that the area is one of the most “sort after” in NYC! 

NYC stands for “Noo Yawk City,” obviously. Who says the accent is dead?

In which I respectfully differ with a Bronx native

  In an otherwise excellent article, Bronx native Ben Wallace-Wells dents his credibility with the following statement:

As a Bronx native I’ve spent the campaign quietly weighing Donald Trump’s New York accent against that of Bernie Sanders. I can declare a split decision. Trump has the better vowels: His yooge obliterates Sanders’s yooge, the perfect measure of dismissiveness without dwelling on itself. But Sanders has the better consonants: when he says speculation, each syllable is a saliva receptacle. What is especially great about both of these accents is that no New Yorkers speak like that anymore, not even in deepest Canarsie. The city is too diverse; its population changes too constantly. Accents so extreme could only be preserved in environments where their bearers did not regularly interact with other New Yorkers: Burlington, Vermont, in one case, and a quartz penthouse in the other.

What? Dude. First, there is a logical inconsistency: what is so magical about interaction with other New Yorkers as opposed to, you know, the good people for Burlington? Being in Vermont is supposed to make it easier to preserve a Brooklyn accent of the older type?

Second, this young man displays unfortunate historical ignorance. (Actually, I have no idea how old he is. He could be fifty. I know from nothing about that.) What, everyone in Bernie Sanders’ Brooklyn was identical? Come on now. They were mostly white back then, but that category meant people who called each other s____, m____, p______, b______, s_______, g______, not to mention the w____ and all the other now-forgotten slurs that white people older than me used to refer to other white people. So the causal model does not make sense: Bernie’s Brooklyn accent was not the accent of some small isolated homogenous rural tribe.

Finally, there is a new New York accent, as I have pointed out on many occasions, which is very similar to the old but not identical. While New Yorkers of all races do speak it, it is relatively rare among NYC-raised non-Hispanic whites (who have, outside of Staten Island, lost the most distinctive parts of the old accent) and so Mr. Wallace-Wells may not have recognized it. The most prominent politician with the accent is this guy: 

Congressman Jeffries does not sound exactly like Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump. But he has a New York accent of the modern type, shared by hundreds of thousands of New York-raised people under age 30. C’mon, Ben! Take it back.

Oh, and here is Congressman Jeffries in full Noo Yawk awesome:

There is a word for “caucus” in Spanish

 The Clinton campaign appears to be trying to play down expectations for the Nevada caucuses. In part, that is because they are having trouble getting Latino voters to the caucuses. One Clinton staffer, Natalie Montelongo, went so far as to say, “There’s no way to translate ‘caucus’ in Spanish. At all.”

Uh, no. “Cónclave.” 

I find it irritating when people engage in this sort of pop linguistics to excuse failings. For example, when a bunch of Venezuelans (above) tried to convince me that there was no Spanish word for accountability. That is sort of true, but only for a pedant: “rendición de cuentas” works perfectly fine. As does, of course, “acountabilidad.” 

I won’t make any grand claims about all languages, because I am not a linguist. But for every official national language in Europe, Asia or the Americas, there is pretty much nothing that you can say in one which cannot be said in another. 

The New York accent is dead, long live the New York accent

The traditional New York-New Jersey accent seems to be fading. (Do not be fooled; they are the same!) Then again, it seems to have been fading for a long time. Governor Al Smith was reknowned at the time for his accent; some even said it contributed to his loss in the 1928 presidential election.

Except, well, all the audio of him seems to show somebody with a barely-discernable accent. Compared to the parade of New Jersey accents appearing on MSNBC these days, Al Smith sounds like he is from Ohio. In the below clip I guess there is a little bit of an accent buried in there somewhere, but not really. He sounds like a deeper-pitched Matt Yglesias.

Smith did have an accent that emerged on occasion. The above clip is from 1933. In this 1928 clip, though, you can hear a very faint “ey” sound instead of “er.” That’s an iconic but archaic marker of NYNJ speech. The archaic accent, however, makes the modern content of the speech rather ironic: consider the studious avoidance of sexism at the end. (Also note the pretense at very high ethical standards. Do not be fooled into thinking that closing bridge lanes would not have sunk a candidate back in 1928.)

Back to the point: the markers of NYNJ speech do not depend on the now-defunct “ey” sound or the rarely-heard “youse.” I took the dialect quiz at the New York Times four times, and each time it pegged me as being from New York, Jersey City, or Yonkers. This despite giving honest answers about my use of “catty-corner” (a phrase I distinctly remember learning in California) and “you all” or “y’all” rather than “youse.”

The accuracy was slightly spooky, in fact. Is this just a New York phenomenon, or can such a short quiz really peg all Americans with such precision?

Why learn a foreign language?

 Geocurrents is a fun blog. I recommend it.

But they can, like all blogs, post some ill-thought-out stuff. They have recently posted a putative takedown of Larry Summers’ argument that universities should cut the resources that they use to teach foreign languages. 

The argument: English is widely-spoken and pretty much all you need for business. Add that to the ever-increasing efficiency of machine translation, and the case for expending mass resources to teach foreign languages disappears. Thus, we should cut back. 

I was looking forward to a solid criticism of this argument. Instead, Geocurrents avoids Summers’ substantive points and then at the end undercuts itself. Since I think that Summers is probably wrong, I find this frustrating.

Let’s proceed, in a lesson about How Not To Build an Argument:

(1) The author points out that most of the world does not, in fact, speak English. Since Summers never argued that they did, it is hard to see the relevance of this point.

(2) The author then points out that a lot of immigrants to the United States speak a language other than English. Of course, their children lose those languages super-fast. Moreover, Summers never claimed that there were no non-English-speakers in the United States, and I have never anybody justify the resources spent on foreign-language teaching by saying that we need to communicate better with immigrants. If that is the author’s argument, then she needs to make it explicitly.

(3) Finally, after two non sequiturs, the author states that machine translation is imperfect. This is perfectly true. Some students of mine recently presented me with a Pemex integrated service contract machine-translated from Spanish: it was so incomprehensible that we went back to the Spanish and translated it ourselves. But ...

First, machine translation is getting better all the time. Summers’ argument is about the future. I want to know why the author of the Geocurrents post believes that translation will be as bad in 2050 as it is now! And I am superlatively annoyed that she does not tell me.

Second, the author then presents a frighteningly good and clear machine translation of a Russian poem. No, it isn’t as poetic as the human translations. But it is completely comprehensible. And since Summers is talking about “doing business in Asia, treating patients in Africa or helping resolve conflicts in the Middle East,” she needs to explain why the level of machine competence shown by her own example is not sufficient to those tasks.

At which point she also needs to explain why machine translation won’t become good enough by 2050. (Or, heck, by 2015!) But I repeat.

In short, the riposte does absolutely zero to grapple with Summers’ contention. It is an example of how not to construct an argument, because it doesn’t actually construct an argument.

Comments are more than welcome. How would you argue against Summers?

The beer test

Lots of pundits say that people vote for candidates with whom they identify. They vote by tribal markers, in other words.

That is wrong. If it were right, I would support Chris Christie. Because, hey, the accent, the attitude, the body language, I love that guy. I don’t want him anywhere near public office, but I love that guy. He is bad for New Jersey, but still. I don’t have to vote for the dude.

Tribal. Even if he is from Jersey. And says weird stuff about polls. I mean, you can dislike President Obama for all sorts of reasons, but the man doesn’t suffer from tacking too close to the polls. 

Then again, Christie sometimes pronounces “all” in some sort of weird generic not-Jersey way, so maybe I don’t love him as much as I thought. Ni modo. Make up your mind, Chris! Oll or awl?

A linguistic history question about presidential politics

 I keep hearing Republicans referring to “this President” instead of “the President.” I don’t recall hearing that phrase in previous election cycles. Is there anyone out there with access to that fancy phrase-tracking software who can see if my memory is correct? Did Democrats refer to George Bush as “this President” in 2004?

To be honest, I don’t think they did. There does seem to be something extraordinary about the lack of respect shown President Obama. Not in the particulars, of course: I remember obnoxious people saying,  “He’s not my President!” in regards to President Bush. And, of course, there was the insane opposition that President Clinton attracted. But in the aggregate, I do not recall the same level of general disrespect in previous election cycles. I certainly do not recall it coming from the opposition candidates.

But perhaps my memory is faulty. Does anyone have any concrete information?

Have you ever wondered if Deadwood got it right?

 I spend a lot of time wondering about Deadwood and other shows set it past English-speaking environments. How do we know if people really talked like that? Well, there is some evidence. But the consensus is that Deadwood is full of it.

 

Will people in the future worry about these things? 

 

xkcd: Period Speech:

via delong.typepad.com

Four out of nine ain’t bad

 So it’s Elena Kagan. I’m not going to get into the merits; I’m not particularly bothered. I’m much more bothered by the Attorney General’s statement that we need a bill relaxing Miranda rights. That said, there is something very important about the appointment: for the first time, we will have four justices from four boroughs: Elena Kagan (Manhattan), Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Brooklyn), Antonin Scalia (Queens), and Sonia Sotomayor (the Bronx). Not only that, but all four of them have New York accents.

Note the way Ms. Kagan pronounces “thought.” Most excellent. Ms. Kagan grew up on the Upper West Side. Aged 50, she may be the last generation of children from that area to possess a distinctive New York accent of the older type. You can still hear the modern type in and around Manhattan Valley, but even there it is fading out in favor a more generic Northeastern accent.

Yeah, that’s Manhattan Valley in 1899! Somebody needs to add a soundtrack.

How to speak Mexican in 197 easy lessons

 I swear a lot in Spanish. My wife doesn't like cursing — public swearing is illegal in Trinidad, and her extensive time in Queens did nothing to change her (most excellent!) preferences — but I can't abandon the practice.  But what I can do is change languages.

Now, the groserías that I picked up as a kid came mostly from Spain (at home) or Puerto Rico (hundreds of different people and places). But my Spanish swearing really didn't come into its own until I lived in Mexico City. That town has developed it to a high art.

Now, courtesy of my old friend Tania Martínez, comes an excellent guide to swearing in Mexican, or, more properly, Chilangese.

I have had to insist that my wife not call me “güey” when she's talking to me, even though that's how she refers to her Mexican friends. When you understand why that sounds wrong, then you will be ready to advance to the next level. When you can explain the proper use of “cagado,” then you will be an expert. Until then, enjoy, learn, and feel free to exercise the Nicoll Doctrine of English language expansion.  You will be doing your country a mitzvah.

And it will come very much in handy while watching sporting events in certain parts of North America and most of Europe north of the Pyrenees. If not a Yankees bar in Boston. Trust me, and I speak from highly embarrassed experience, somebody will understand you.

Bronx, accents, Supreme Court

  And it goes to the woman who saved baseball™!  Excellent.  But I want to discuss accents.  Sonia Sotomayor is from the Bronx, you see, and will bring a third New York accent to the bench, after Antonin Scalia from Queens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg from Brooklyn.

Sotomayor has an accent of the older type, with modern elements, which many people (of all ages) in the New York region still speak.  The fellow who gives the New York speech lessons certainly does, as do I with my relatives.  But it is not a fully modern accent of the sort spoken by my younger in-laws.  See here at minute 1:52 (it is worth it) or here or here. 

What about the other two New York members of the Court?

Accents, Brooklyn

  Over at Randy's place, he's got a neat post on the survival of Dutch in New York City.  Seems like it held on for a couple centuries after the English took it over.  In the post, Randy suggests that the “Brooklyn” accent derives from Dutch.  Peter takes issue, debate ensues. 

Goin' Back To Brooklyn @ Yahoo! Video

Here, I'd like to say three things about New York accents.

1. There are no geographic variations.  None.  Zip.  Say-roe.  All of what seems to be geographic variation is due to race, immigration, or social class.  All of it.  Anyone who tells you otherwise is either confused or f*@king with you.  I have been asked this question every goddamned time I go to Britain.  It ain't true.  Somebody from New York, they say different, they probably be playing games.   
2. The traditional New York accent is dead.  (For a brief period in college, I tried to affect one, for reasons which are beyond me.  My natural speech is bad enough.)  Its more modern variations are also in fact dying, save for ...
3. ... the accent exemplified by Rosie Perez, held by most children of Latino immigrants in the New York metropolitan area, and now spreading throughout the Northeast. It is somewhat different from the previously dominant version of the accent, and it is replacing that version very rapidly.  Even among non-Latinos.

For your edification, click here for Ms. Perez on Letterman, with the new New York accent.  It's worth it.  (For some reason, the damned embedding won't work.)  My older sister isn't quite young enough to talk like this, although I have some very non-Latino in-laws in their twenties who do.  You can see two more examples of the same accent coming from the eyewitnesses in the below BBC report around minute 2:06.

Finally, here is a fellow who gives pretty good lessons in the older version of New York English, the one I speak with my siblings.  He does confuse class and geography, presumably ingenuously, when he describes his accent as a mix of Westchester and Staten Island.  There is no speech difference between a blue-collar dude from Rosebank or one from southeastern Yonkers, or between the child of Ivy League graduates in Todt Hill or in Scarsdale.  He is simply cottoning on to the fact that there are a lot more upper-class types in Westchester County than in Richmond County, and a lot fewer plumbers and police officers. 

Now that you been schooled in the Kings English, what sort of English do you speak? 

America returns, with a New York accent

  Below is an example of intellectual heroism. It was strange to see Senator Cornyn (R-Texas) ask a question that boiled down to: “If you concede that my argument is correct, then isn’t my argument correct?” Do you think he noticed the chuckles?

Carpetbagging

I'll admit it.  I give money to this guy, who's running for office in a state that I've never been to.  (I've been to Illinois, I've been to Iowa ... boyoboy have I been to Iowa ... but never north.)  I'm even attending a fundraiser he'll be throwing in Cambridge next week.

But his opponent, well, that dude has a thicker Brooklyn accent than I do, so I feel okay about it.  And as you'd expect, my guy's advertisements are, like, totally awesome.