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Sports Metaphors

February 4, 2013

We have to be faster, higher, and stronger! The media really jumped the gun on that story. Relax...Life is a marathon not a sprint.

Those are just a few Olympic terms we use to compare life to a high-level competition. And with one year to go to the Sochi Winter Games, we'll likely be hearing more Olympic metaphors.

Metaphors help us understand the world by equating one concept with another. And whether you know it or not, we use them all the time. War is a game. A business is a family. Marriage is an institution; or, marriage is a partnership.

We use sports metaphors in particular.

We can use a football field to refer to making a desperate move like a Hail Mary pass or to run interference. A baseball field can represent struggle: we're in the bottom of the ninth, or you need to step up to the plate.

Some Canadians stick with the ol' hockey metaphor. Veteran communications specialist Barry McLoughlin gives an example:

"Look we're ragging the puck on that issue right now, okay? You know we're not going to release or announce this just yet, we're ragging the puck. That's a classic one that's used extensively."

McLoughlin says sports metaphors can be a great communication tool: "Whether you're involved personally in sports, whether your kids are in soccer or in hockey, or whether your spouse is watching it on television, it becomes the language that everybody can share in”.

But McLoughlin adds that if you're in the political or business world, using too many sports metaphors can be risky. "Because after awhile, it's almost as if you're taking the issue too lightly. Maybe you're not getting the emotions and feelings behind it,” he says.

“This would be a concern in terms of your own sincerity and credibility."

Indeed, the metaphors we use can tell us something about how we think. And what we think can determine how we act, and how we relate to other people.

So, what if you don't see the world in terms of sticks and pucks?

McLaughlin says with more women in business and politics, sports metaphors could be on the way out: "I think we're on a decline in the usage. It's a heavy kind of legacy of a macho era, and it's not seen as overly sophisticated."

While some women do of course use sports metaphors, others prefer comparisons to home or family. For instance, describing government priorities in terms of balancing the household chequebook.

It’s less competitive – more cooperative.

New immigrants, too, are bringing different ways of seeing the world, and a passion for different sports. Soccer is Canada's fastest growing sport, and there's no shortage of people who see life as a soccer field where you don't want to be shown the red card.

While the sports metaphors we use may be changing, it's safe to say they'll be around for as long as we play games.

May you ALL own the podium.

 

Listen to the audio here (and on iTunes):

 

 

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Digital Dictionaries

January 7, 2013

You're reading the morning news and suddenly you're confronted with a word you don't know. Perfunctory, let's say. Rather than ignore it, or maybe look it up in a print dictionary, you just call the word up online.

Digital dictionaries are becoming increasingly popular; the Modern Languages Association even devoted a session to them at its recent annual convention.

So let's explore what's gained and lost in the shift from offline to online.

Ubiquitous, schadenfreude, bourgeois are some of the most sought after pronunciations in Merriam-Webster's online dictionary. Hearing the word is a definite plus when you're looking it up.

Peter Sokolwski agrees. He's Merriam-Webster's editor at large, and presented at the convention. "We know that is something people really highly value," he says.

"Having an audio pronunciation that's not some kind of a synthesized computer voice but a real human voice, especially from people who are learning English as a second language. And we know maybe a billion people are learning English who don't speak it at home."

Other websites, including Vocabulary.com, offer audio pronunciations as well. Executive producer Ben Zimmer, who also presented at the convention, says the website used several opera singers to make the 140,000 sound files because they're adept at interpreting the International Phonetic Alphabet. Consider it a grammatical serenade.

Online dictionaries also allow us to tap into the zeitgeist. Merriam-Webster.com does that by measuring which words are looked up when. Sokolwski says we go online in times of crisis.

After 9/11, some of the dictionary's most popular terms were rubble, terrorism and surreal. And when Michael Jackson died, we scrambled to look up stricken, resuscitate, icon and emaciated.

Last year, m-w.com's most looked-up words were socialism and capitalism, often together -- people grappling with politics and the economy.

Online dictionaries can measure the words we don't get (insidious or conundrum); the ones we can't spell (there, their and they're), and the ones we trip over (affect versus effect).

"People are using the dictionary more because it's so much more accessible," says Sokolwski. "That way they can confirm anytime, anywhere."

And we're seeing words added faster in online dictionaries: within several years, not decades. Consider some of the 2012 additions to Oxford (which includes the Canadian Oxford): urbanscape, bling (and blinging) and superbad.

On many sites, users can interact by adding their own word suggestions, and sites such as Wordnik.com compile data from many sources, including Twitter and Flickr.

Look up polythene and you'll also get its Scrabble score (17), as well as a handy Beatles song title ("Polythene Pam").

And then there's Google. If you simply enter "define" and your word of choice, voila! Multiple definitions from multiple sources within seconds.

But, perhaps it's all a little too much information. Which is why some digital dictionaries are offering simplified definitions, especially for ESLers.

In the online world, you also lose the serendipity of discovering other words besides the one you looked up.

While Ben Zimmer acknowledges that, he says we'll simply develop different orientations to text as we go online. He's also the head of Visual Thesaurus.com, which he says is modelled on how our brain works, and uses word maps.

Indeed, with print dictionaries in decline, the future is digital.

MacMillan Dictionaries just announced it will only be online, Encyclopedia Brittanica too, and the Oxford English Dictionary is considering. It's a big switch. It means having to create a whole new business model, depending more on advertisers, and users who are willing to pay extra for perks.

Nonetheless, Peter Sokolwski is optimistic: "It is the age of also. In other words, we have so many choices. We have the dictionary as a book, we also have that same content online or in an app in your phone.

And as long as we make that content available in every possible way so that you can find it quickly and consistently, then we all win."

Publishers, advertisers, and especially us, the users. More than ever, we can play with language and learn new words, like quixotic (which, by the way, has a Scrabble score of 26).

Listen to the audio here, or look up "Word of Mouth with Colleen Ross" on iTunes.

 

 

 

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December 16, 2012

Once upon a time, we used the preposition "upon". Alas, its days are numbered.

It's the 200th anniversary of the publication of the Grimm's Fairy Tales this month, which is inspiration enough to look at the changing nature of prepositions.

Those little words have an important function, usually locating us in time and space. As the way we relate to time and space changes, we reduce our use of words like upon, add others, and modify meanings. Because prepositions morph so much, they can seem confusing.

Robert Lane Greene, who writes The Economist's "Johnson" blog on language, says it comes down to how these words evolved.

"For example, behind has a hint of the old word "hind quarter" – the hind – so it was something near your rear end, essentially,” says Greene. “So they start very literal [and] they become pretty concrete but still spatially literal. Like behind is a location in space, and then you can say I'm behind in my work and that's a more abstract meaning."

So they can be grounded in the physical or the abstract.

But often, the prepositions we use don't make the most sense. We say in debt, when under debt might be more appropriate. We open up a store in the morning, and close it up at night. An alarm goes off by going on. Even varieties of English differ; we say on the weekend where Britons say at.

"Whether a single preposition is correct isn't established by a logic; it's usually just by convention,” says Greene. “We dream about something in English. You say soñar con in Spanish: to dream with something. The speech community itself gets to establish what random preposition out of the bag might go with certain phrases or certain expressions."

Since preposition use isn't obvious or even logical, it can be challenging when we have a new spatial relationship. Like moving from physical, to digital.

"Do you say on or in a website?" Greene asks. "For example, Slate calls itself a magazine; it's a news and commentary website. But people will tend to say on Slate, or in Slate. In some cases, the correct preposition takes a while to shake out [but] usually it will. People say on Twitter, not in Twitter."

And with research studies proliferating in the news, the media have taken to saying a study out of such and such university, versus by particular researchers.

Over the past half century, we’ve actually added a number of new prepositions, according to Brett Reynolds, an English professor at Humber College. One of them is post, as in: How is the water, post Walkerton? I used it myself the other day: Post vacation, I always feel a little blue (but then I quickly bounce back!).   

 So, if we're continually adopting new ways to use prepositions, why do we cling to the old idea that we shouldn't end a sentence with a preposition?

We avoid it. Or we do it, but quickly cover up. Or we try to avoid it, and do it anyway.

The idea of preposition "stranding" dates back to the 1600s to poet and essayist John Dryden. He liked to compose his writing in Latin then translate into English - more sophisticated, apparently. And in Latin, a preposition must precede its object. The idea was condoned in an influential grammar book in the 1700s, and stays with us today. 

"One linguist I know calls it a zombie rule," says Greene. "It's dead and everyone knows it's dead and yet it keeps on coming at you."

But in fact, it's often more natural to end with a preposition. As in: She likes being fussed over; He relishes the project he's taking on; Who are you talking to?!

If we just moved on from that old-fashioned rule, we would all live happily ever after.

 

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST HERE (it's more fun):

www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/wordofmouth.xml

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November 2, 2012

Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have been posturing and pontificating for what feels like forever; not even superstorm Sandy could slow them much.

Their speeches are wildly applauded (by supporters, at least), closely analyzed and assiduously fact-checked.

With good reason. Campaign speeches can play an important role in determining whom Americans will elect. But some researchers feel that may be due not as much to content or delivery as to the particular words they contain.

They can tell that by using the cool world of mathematics to cut through the blustery bombast of politics.

Chetan Narain, who has a degree in operations research and financial engineering from Princeton and now works for Google, says the actual words in a candidate's speech are more important than you might think.

"One thing that I think words do, especially in the modern world of Twitter, Facebook and the internet in general, is that they stick with you long after the speech is over."

Think of, ahem, Romney's comment from a recent presidential debate of having received "binders full of women."

Narain created a mathematical model that he says can predict who will win a presidential race, based on campaign speeches alone.

This might seem a bit crystal ball-ish. But hang on. What Narain did was analyze more than a thousand speeches from 12 presidential campaigns between 1952 to 1996, as well as 2008.

From that, he created a model that predicted whether a speech came from a winning candidate or a losing one.

Winning words

Speeches clearly can't encapsulate all the factors that can decide an