E-Books and the Future of Publishing

1 May 2012

I missed this a few days ago, but Timothy Egan has a thought-provoking piece in the New York Times on e-books and the future of publishing.

E-books, and the way they are currently produced and distributed, are not an unalloyed good. They have their drawbacks, but Egan’s main thrust is quite correct. The doomsayers who evoke the specter of a coming cultural wastelands are flat out wrong. There is this:

In their annual report last August, the Association of American Publishers reported that overall revenues, and number of books sold in all formats, were up sizably in three years since 2008. Without e-books, the numbers would have been flat, or declined.

One-fifth of all American adults reported reading an e-book in the past year, according to an optimistic report from the Pew Center. And those digital consumers read far more books on average—about 24 a year—than the dead-tree consumers.

Another surprise: e-book readers also buy lots of paper books. The buyers of digital tomes “read more books in all formats,” Pew reported.

And Egan also notes the resurgence of independent bookstores.

The lesson here is not to confuse the business model with the thing itself. The traditional business model used by publishers is doomed, not publishing itself.

[Tip ‘o the Hat: Andrew Sullivan]

Hen: Swedish Gender Neutral Pronoun

12 April 2012

Slate has an article on Sweden’s “new” gender neutral pronoun. Hen can be used when one wishes to avoid han (he) and hon (she).

First a couple of comments about the journalistic style. For one thing, the headline gets it wrong. There is nothing “new” about the pronoun. Right there in the article it says that the word has been floating around the edges of Swedish for half a century. Second, the lede is buried. If the article is about the pronoun, as the headline suggests, why is it not mentioned until paragraph five, after discussing how the Swedish Bowling Association promotes gender equality? It turns out the article really isn’t about the pronoun; it’s about the politics of gender equality in Sweden, which is a perfectly fine topic, but in that case have the headline emphasize that and not the linguistic angle.

It is good to see, however, that idiotic language commentary is not confined to Anglophones. Whatever your opinion of the advisability of hen might be, the addition of the pronoun won’t destroy the Swedish language or confuse children about sexuality, as some quoted in the article suggest. Both language and kid’s brains are resilient and highly adaptable. They both will weather this tempest just fine.

Will the pronoun succeed? It’s unlikely. Structural words, like pronouns, articles, and conjunctions, are the most resistant to change. The last time English added a pronoun was she in twelfth century, and even that was just a shift in pronunciation of the Old English sio, not the wholesale adoption of a new word, and as the article notes, hen has been around since the 1960s and really been nothing more than a curiosity. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs invade and rampage through the language like marauding Huns, but pronouns, conjunctions, articles, and prepositions are bulwarks against the raging hordes of lexical fashion. A major push to get Swedes to start using hen might have an impact, but probably not. It’ll be easier to revolutionize bowling.

Do We Need Stories?

1 April 2012

Tim Parks has a nice reflection on the importance, or perhaps lack thereof, of the novel and stories in our lives over at the New York Review of Books Blog.

You may wonder what this has to do with word origins. To answer that, here is an extract from Parks’s piece:

But there are also words that come complete with entire narratives, or rather that can’t come without them. The only way we can understand words like God, angel, devil, ghost, is through stories, since these entities do not allow themselves to be known in other ways, or not to the likes of me. Here not only is the word invented—all words are—but the referent is invented too, and a story to suit. God is a one-word creation story.

It’s an engaging piece, and I largely agree with Parks’s conclusions, but I’m not sure I would frame the essay in the same way. It’s not that stories are important or necessary, it’s that they are inescapable. Humans are storytelling organisms. It’s what we do.

[Hat tip to Chris Pugh]

The Jersey Shore and the Jersey Accent

22 February 2012

The Dialect Blog, a site that I don’t mention enough, but is quite excellent, has a nice little piece on how the accents featured on the reality TV show The Jersey Shore are actually mostly New York accents.

I grew up on the Jersey shore. During summers in my college years I even worked on the Seaside Heights boardwalk. So, while it’s been a while since I’ve been immersed in this particular dialectal environment, I can attest that this post is dead-on. The locals could spot the bennies easily, based largely on accent.

(Benny is a mildly derogatory, Monmouth and Ocean County, New Jersey term for a tourist from upstate or New York. It’s fading from use now, but you’ll hear it occasionally. It even made an appearance on The Jersey Shore. (Yes, I watched, and was amused by, the first season.) The origin of benny is uncertain. It could be from a New York term meaning “Jew,” but if so, it has lost all anti-Semitic connotation in the move south. Other explanations I’ve heard, but have no evidence for and which I suspect are etymythologies, are that the word is from people who come to the shore for the “benny-ficial rays of the sun” and from the fact that way back when, many people came to the beach bearing lunches packed in a shoe boxes from a Benny’s shoe store, which was somewhere up north.)

Slate's Lexicon Valley

7 February 2012

Slate magazine has a new language podcast, Lexicon Valley. If the first episode is any indication, the podcast will be a good one.

Hosts Bob Garfield and Mike Vuolo do not appear to have any formal linguistic credentials, but their first show on preposition stranding was first rate. They gave a thorough history of the idea that one should not end a sentence with a preposition, rightly putting the lion’s share of the blame for the false belief on poet John Dryden. The episode features input from linguists Jack Lynch and Nuria Yáñez-Bouza, who is one of the leading experts on the history of preposition stranding, so the pair get kudos for going to real experts on the subject. They didn’t rise to the bait of attributing the “up with which I will not put” to Winston Churchill. And the show is professionally produced and fun. While at one point they did go into a lengthy digression about Restoration theater in England which was only tangentially related to the topic, the digression was informed and interesting, so it can be forgiven. Besides, digressions and going off on tangents are part of the joy of podcasts.

My one nit is with their description of Robert Lowth, an eighteenth century grammarian who is often unfairly categorized as prescriptive and blamed for the preposition stranding taboo. (Lowth said that preposition stranding was often inelegant and not appropriate for certain formal registers, but never claimed that it was ungrammatical.) Garfield and Vuolo accurately characterized Lowth’s position on the subject, but they described him as a “bishop” and a “self-styled” language expert. In truth, Lowth was not a bishop when he wrote his grammar; he was a very young clergyman at the time; the episcopate came much later in life. And all linguists of that era were “self-styled.” It’s not like there were many linguistic PhD programs in the eighteenth century. He was an expert, plain and simple. His methodology would be considered dodgy by today’s standards, but by the standards of his era he was a paragon of academic excellence. But as I said, this criticism is very minor, and I only mention it because I’m writing a paper on Lowth and fellow eighteenth-century grammarian Joseph Priestley, and it’s a current hobby horse of mine.

I don’t know how often they will produce their program, but I’m looking forward to the next one.

The show is available from the Slate website and via iTunes.