Spelling Weirdness at the OED

3 June 2011

I just found an odd entry. It’s nothing big, just an oddity that I want to point out. While searching the OED for something else, I was offered a cross-reference to the term riot girl. Curious, I clicked on it. I found out that a riot girl was a member or follower of one of the many female rock bands that flourished in the 1990s. Fine enough, a neat little bit of social history. But then I noticed the citations. In every single one, the term is spelled riot grrrl or riot grrl. Yet the dictionary’s head word uses the conventional spelling girl. Did the OED simply regularize the spelling for the headword?

But the dictionary does have a separate entry for grrrl to accommodate this spelling variation. Why have a separate entry for this, and not include it as a variant sense and spelling under the main headword for girl, yet standardize the spelling for riot girl? Given that this is online, it’s easy enough to allow the search function to point those who spell it riot girl to the right entry. Both entries were in the batch that was published in December 2001, so they went through editorial review at roughly the same time (and perhaps were even written by the same person). What’s going on here? Is this an oversight, or is there some arcane editorial standard at work here?

(I haven’t included links to the entries because I’m not sure how to generate a generic link to the OED anymore. The links that I use all go through the University of Toronto servers and are useless to anyone not using the U of T system. If anyone knows the correct URL syntax for a generic OED entry, please let me know by email or in the discussion forums. In any case, it’s easy enough to find these entries using the dictionary’s search function.)

[Edit: corrected spelling error, 13 June]

Profanity at the New Yorker

31 May 2011

A neat historical summary of when “dirty” words first appeared in the pages of that august magazine. Who would have guessed that Calvin Trillin would have been the first to write the word fuck in The New Yorker.

[Hat tip to Jesse Sheidlower’s Twitter feed]

Comedy and Philosophy

27 May 2011

[Update below. The original post was 11 March 2011.]

Sometimes comedians are on the cutting edge of philosophical inquiry.

The issue is illustrated in an anecdote about three baseball umpires who were arguing about their job. Each called balls and strikes; each was bragging as to who did the best job. Said one: “I call them as I see them—and no one can do better than that.” The second retorted, “That’s nothing: I call them as they are.” The third paused a moment, and finally added: “They ain’t nothing until I call them—and then that’s what they are.” (Doby 16–17)

That’s an old joke, recorded here in a textbook from 1954. It’s a funny joke, although Doby’s telling of it isn’t the best. But what makes it significant is that the joke is about performative utterances. British philosopher J. L. Austin formulated a line of philosophical inquiry based on speech acts, utterances that, by the very fact they are spoken, perform an action that changes our material world. Classic examples of performative utterances include “I now pronounce you husband and wife,” “I christen this ship the Queen Mary,” and the pronouncements of sports officials. The idea of performative utterances is quite insidious. At first it seems like a simple categorization of a small and quirky class of statement, but the implications for performative utterances run deep and can undermine much of what we think about language and how we use it. Austin’s speech act theory has become a productive staple of modern literary analysis.

But what interests me here is that Austin first formulated his ideas on speech act theory and peformative utterances in 1955 in a series of lectures given at Harvard and published in 1962 as the book How to Do Things With Words. The umpire joke predates this. It is included in Doby’s textbook a year before Austin gave his lectures, and the joke is undoubtedly older—Doby had to have heard it somewhere. Austin was clearly picking up on and refining a discourse that was “in the air” at the time.

For his part, Doby was skirting around the question of speech acts when he published the joke in his book:

One issue that often brings out passionate discourse in those scientists who are otherwise detached and aloof is the question as to whether the “laws” discerned by science constitute a part of the “real world,” or whether the real world can be described by atomic empirical observations and the “laws” are the products of orderly human minds (16).

I don’t have a big point here. I just find it amusing that some anonymous wag created a joke that succinctly expresses the heart of a philosophical movement some years before the philosophers discovered it.

Update:

It’s been brought to my attention that the phrase, “it ain’t nothin’ until I call it,” is commonly attributed to one of two baseball umpires, either Bill Klem (1874–1951) or Charlie Moran (1878–1949) (Shapiro 433). So the idea was floating around baseball long before Austin picked up on it.

Works cited:

Austin, J. L. How to Do Things With Words. Second edition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1975. Print.

Doby, John T. An Introduction to Social Research. Harrisburg: The Stackpole Company. 1954. Print.

Shapiro, Fred R., ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2006. Print.