On the BBC’s “Click” podcast last week, they discussed evolving voice technologies, and their increasing ability to incorporate complex prosodic and phonological properties like emotional emphasis and accent. It’s an interesting conversation and worth listening to, but the segment that caught my attention touched on Stephen Hawking and the preservation of legacy technologies related to his voice:

A 2001 Deborah Cameron article on “designer voices” provides some interesting context for Hawking’s choices regarding his synthesized voice:

Hawking faces an unusual choice here. It may seem obvious that a British accent would be more ‘authentic’ than the American one he has had to make do with up until now; this is a question of what linguists call ‘social indexicality’, the ability of the speaking voice to point to social characteristics like age, gender, class, ethnicity or, most saliently in this case, national origin. Yet voices are also privileged markers of individual identity. It would not be unreasonable for Hawking to take the view that his synthesised American voice essentially is his voice, in the sense that it is instantly recognisable as the voice of Stephen Hawking (indeed, so recognisable that Hawking can earn money doing advertising voice-overs). Some media reports noted that the scientist was having difficulty deciding whether to make the shift: he was quoted as saying that ‘it will bring a real identity crisis’.

There are a couple of issues here that I think are compelling. The first is one that both the podcast and Cameron note: Hawking’s choice speaks to the complex and powerful connection between our voice and our identity(s). In particular, it suggests that such a relationship can be an evolving one. In his early encounters with his synthesized voice, Hawking experiences a kind of distance from its American-ness. However, he ultimately chooses to retain it in the face of other possibilities. And there is no question how recognizable his voice is, inspiring a raft of amateur and professional parodies.

The other interesting issue is what that choice has meant technically. It has necessitated the preservation of legacy technologies in order maintain a powerful signifier of self. Which makes me wonder. As technologies continue to emerge that connect those technologies to our biologies, our identities and the signals we use to advertise those identities will change, too. Those inter-related changes, technological and indexical, may not move at the same pace, however. What might this mean? Could a voice, an identity, face a forced obsolescence?

You’ve probably seen or at least heard about Clint Eastwood’s speech at the Republican convention. It became noteworthy for his address to an imagined Obama represented by an empty chair. What is interesting to me linguistically, is what happened afterward: Eastwooding became a meme. This is the newest example (putting aside any potential queasiness about the implications of the mass mocking of an elderly person) of a process of verbing names. Of course, the other recent, notable example is Tebowing.

In these instances, a celebrity’s name stands in for a specific act (talking to an empty chair or kneeling in prayer), the -ing affix is added to the name, and the spread of the linguistic form is often accompanied by a visual representation (either a photo or a video). And the linguistic form (as -ing forms do) can function as a noun as it does in this headline:

‘Tebowing‘ makes transition from Internet meme to race horse

But can also be a verb in the progressive aspect as it is here:

I feel like I am Eastwooding on SS [Sweet Shangai] recently

The word formation process that makes verbs out of proper nouns isn’t new. From COHA, here’s an example of Xerox being used as a verb from 1969:

…given their obvious merit and high level of lubricity, to have them xeroxed while they were in my possession,

A well known example of an individual whose name became verbed is the basketball player Kevin Pitsnoggle. His name came to mean being beaten by an unlikely opponent or specifically by the 3-point shot:

In a dramatic twist of irony, West Virginia was pittsnogled last night.

Unlike Tebowing and Eastwooding, pittsnogled usually appears in the past participle (-ed form) and in the passive. These two two patterns (-ing and passive) seem to be the most frequent patterns of formation.

Part of what I think is interesting is that while there are certainly pre-Internet examples, I think the process of verbing the names of individuals is at least accelerating, particularly in computer-mediated spaces.

The names that are verbed seem to be (not surprisingly) celebrities of various stripes (actors, politicians, athletes). So, for example, U.S. Presidents are frequently verbed:

Reagan Coolidged Kennedy

Well, I’ve been Reaganed I suppose.

And then the unemployment benefits will start to run out for people, like me, where [sic] were Obamaed…

There’s a reason the audio has been Nixoned.

For fun, I did some quick searches on COHA to see if there is any historical precedent for these kinds of uses, but couldn’t come up with any. Also, as the above example of Coolidged illustrates, the names that are verbed can be historical not just contemporary. So while you can go Eastwooding, you can also be Marie Antoinetted:

A radio show in the US that focuses on economic issues, published something last week they call “Money slang: Marketplace’s urban finance dictionary.” The dictionary raises a few issues that I think are interesting and one that I want to check out using COHA.

The first interesting issue is what they choose to include. They use “urban” in the title and have a quite a few words that either emerge from or are popularized in hip hop and rap like Benjamins (Sean Combs and Notorious B.I.G.) or bling (B.G.). Then we have tuppence, which is not only not from hip hop (obviously) but doesn’t seem to me to be particularly slangy (from the OED):

The hodgepodge nature of the list raises the issue of how the compilers are defining “slang.” Slang is a notoriously messy category. Is it the newness of the words that matter? Or is it the community of speakers that matter–namely youth? Or is it the words’ use for social grouping rather than something like work or eluding authorities? All of these are questions that don’t necessarily have easy answers. If you’re interested in such things, you should check out Adams.

The other issue that I wanted to explore in more detail has to do with the purported origins of some of these words. Determining the etymology of slang is tough. Particularly before computer-mediated communication, slang was primarily coined and circulated in spoken discourse, which of course leaves little historical record. We rely, then, on written records, and by the time a slang word makes it into print, it has likely been circulating elsewhere for a while.

A related problem is that popular treatments like this article sometimes circulate false (or folk) etymologies. And there is an example here that I wanted to check out because the cited word origin seemed unlikely and because I thought it posed a challenging problem for using corpora.

The entry that caught my eye was for bread. Its says this:

Bread — May have originated from jazz great Lester Young. He is said to have asked “How does the bread smell?” when asking how much a gig was going to pay.

The authors have taken care to hedge their contention with the modal may, but the story of Lester Young struck me as perhaps apocryphal. So I thought it would be fun to investigate.

Bread as slang for money is a challenging search as its meaning as food is much more common. So we need to find ways to sort out the different uses. One strategy is to think about how the different uses might have different collocational patterns. One such pattern occurs with verbs. Unfortunately, one common verb, make, isn’t of much help, since you can “make bread” in both senses. As an alternative, I thought I’d try earn. A search for bread collocating with earn within four tokens to the left or right yields this result:

Most of the concordance lines are of this type from 1856:

workshops at the expense of the state, in which able-bodied citizens could earn their bread. Thus the people were taxed exorbitantly to maintain a costly and cumbersome and corrupting

This use is somewhat different from the slang use. It has a more generalized meaning of sustenance (as opposed to the specific meaning of money), and likely comes from Biblical metaphor “daily bread.” However, the pattern of collocation with earn and with work-related terms seems like a short semantic leap to the more restricted meaning of money, as it does in this concordance line from 1959:

I mean I ought to be out getting a job, man. Earning some bread for the old lady. Got to have money, got to have a job

My guess is that the slang is the result of semantic narrowing from an already existing metaphorical use of bread. But like I said, documenting the precise origin isn’t easy.

An article in the news yesterday reported on a a study that is analyzing changes in the frequencies of the masculine (he/him/his) and feminine (she/her/hers) pronouns using Google books as a corpus. I’m sure most of you are familiar with Google books. In December of 2010, they introduced an interface that allows a limited set of searches of their digitized collection. The introduction of the interface was accompanied by an article in Science that weirdly didn’t acknowledge the existence of corpus linguistics and seemed to reinvent the field under the new (and clumsy) moniker of “culturomics”. The shortcomings of the article and the corpus were quickly addressed by linguists like Mark Liberman and Geoff Nunberg.

What these responses point out are the limitations of Google books as a corpus: it is not principled; it is not balanced; because its construction is automated, it contains numerous errors; etc. And my own experiences using Google books to find texts to include in my own corpora reinforce these kinds of concerns. I have often found texts with publication dates that are incorrect, as well as texts (particularly older texts) that have numerous errors from OCR scanning.

Given some of the potential problems with Google books as a corpus resource, I was, therefore, interested in putting some of the findings of of the pronoun study to the test. For my Coffee Break Experiment, I’m using the COHA rather than Google books, and Mark Davies has written a nice comparison of the two. I was curious if the findings of the study are confirmed or not.

For the purposes of this experiment, I’m only going to look at the subject pronouns he and she. First, using the BYU interface (rather than the n-gram viewer), here are the results from Google books:

Now, here are the results from COHA:

According to the AP article, the research find:

The ratio of male to female pronouns was roughly 3.5:1 until 1950, when the gap began to widen as more women stayed home after World War II, and peaked at around 4.5:1 in the mid-1960s. The ratio had shrunk to 3:1 by 1975, and less than 2:1 by 2005.

The data from COCA shows a pattern that is similar, though slightly different. Here is a chart showing the change in the ratio of frequencies over time:

The ratios in COHA are all lower than what is reported in the study. Also, COHA shows more movement early, then a steadier ratio of about 2.1:1 from 1860-1940. Then, however, we find the same inflection point–albeit at a lower ratio (3:1 vs. 4.5:1) in 1960.

Of course, what is most interesting about all of this–and the reason it gets attention in the press–is speculation as to why. What is driving these changes in frequency? The article quotes James Pennebaker. He suggests:

“Pronouns are a sign of people paying attention and as women become more present in the workforce, in the media and life in general, people are referring to them more.”

We should be careful about attributing psychological motivations to the production of specific linguistic features like pronouns. That said, there is clearly something going on that is driving these changes.