Interjections

Sometimes I learn things in school that might actually be interesting to people outside the field of Linguistics.

Last week in my Semantics class we studied interjections. (For those of you who don't remember grade school grammar class, interjections are words like "oh," "dang," and "wow" that we interject to express emotion.) My professor explained--in very scientific terms that I no longer remember--that as far as the geography of the brain is concerned, normal speech is processed in one region of the brain and interjections are processed in a completely separate region.

Which means that when children are learning to speak, you can repeat the word "mama" to them a hundred times before they say it back, but they only have to hear you say "uh-oh" or "dang it" once before they start repeating it over and over again. While the normal speech functions are developing in one part of the brain, the injections part of the brain is also developing. And as the interjections part is developing it's just waiting to pick up on interjections. So when kids hear interjections (including swear words), even if they are embedded in a sentence, their interjection receptors are triggered and ta-da! they start using those interjections--whether you want them to or not. (Both my sister and sister-in-law lamented they day their sweet little two-year-olds picked up "dang it"--but I'm sure there are much more offensive words they could be using.)

As an interjection illustration, my prof also shared this excellent story: When he used to visit his mother in a nursing home, he also visited with another woman there who had suffered from a stroke. The stroke destroyed the part of her brain that controlled normal speech functions, but not the part that stored interjections. As a result, her only way to communicate with other people was through swear words. This man would sit and talk to her, ask her questions, tell her stories, whatever, and she would just swear back at him.

One day he explained to her the whole scientific process of how the speech part of her brain was gone but the interjections part was still in tact and that he understood that when she was swearing at him, she was only trying to communicate.

Her response: "Smart-A--"

Curse of the Pink Shirt

Many years ago (like back in the Southridge days), I had favorite pink, polyester shirt that I wore frequently. And although I really loved the shirt, I noticed that weird things happened when I wore pink, as opposed to other colors. More people talked to me--classmates, random strangers--and when I walked through the quad and the Wilk, I was targeted more by the people handing out flyers and promoting . . . stuff. The difference between the number of flyers I received on pink shirt days versus other color days was disturbing. And I concluded that something about the pink shirt made me seem more approachable--not always my goal in life.

Fast forward to today:

I went to the Cougareat to finish my reading assignment for my next class. I chose the Cougareat because I wanted to be able sit at an actual table and eat while I studied--which isn't possible in most campus study areas. However, since it was 11:00 on Thursday (opposite the Tuesday devotional), the Cougareat was particularly busy. Hoping for some level of seclusion, I chose a small table against the wall on the furthest end of the seating area.

Twenty minutes into to my reading, a guy I've never seen before, asked if he could sit at my table. Of course, I was fine with that. I could see the tables were pretty well full, and I don't care if someone else wants to quietly eat their sandwich at the same table as me.

Unfortanately, this particular person did not eat his sandwich quietly. He asked me what book I was reading. Then he asked about my field of study. Then, of course, I felt obligated to ask him about his life. I tried to return to my book--Language Universals and Linguistic Typology--several times, but Stan, the senior in manufacturing engineering from Colorado who will be working in Seattle for Boeing when he graduates in December, just kept the conversation going. Don't get me wrong, he was a very nice person, and we could probably be friends, but I really needed to finish my reading assignment for my next class.

When I got to class, I was explaining to my classmates why I didn't finish the reading, and I glanced down and realized I was wearing a pink shirt--not the bright polyester one from before, obviously, this one is cotton, baby pink. But pink, nonetheless. And pink is the cursed color when you don't want to make friends. Pink is approachable.

So next time I know I need to study between classes, I will choose my wardrobe more carefully.

School Started Last Tuesday

And although I spent nearly my entire Saturday diligently working on homework, I will be up very late tonight (probably into the early morning hours) finishing assignments for tomorrow.

Yay for graduate school.

(The preferred spelling is actually yea, but so many people confuse yea with yeah that I often choose the more colloquial spellings of yay and ya. And the scriptural yea means something completely different and further adds to the confusion--just in case anyone was questioning my knowledge of the English language. In addition, since the yay spelling resembles the word hooray, it further suits this particular usage.)

The World of Customer Service Presents: Intelligent Emails

As some people know, I currently work as a customer service representative for a family history website. (No, it's not Ancestry.) So I spend my wonderful time at work answering phone calls and responding to emails from customers. Most of our customers are totally nice, sweet elderly genealogy nuts. Some are demanding and whiny. Some are angry and mean. And some are just plain confused (and confusing.)

Customers purchase subscriptions to the site in order to have access to different genealogically relevant records and databases. That's it. That's the service. They pay money, log in, and start searching for their ancestors. But you'd be amazed by how many questions and how much confusion this generates.

So one of my favorite emails to get from customers--and we do get it often--goes something like this:

why can't i find my family

Yes, they do leave out any punctuation or capitalization.

Another popular version:

I CANT FND ANYTHOIMG ON YOUR SITR

The all caps and obvious misspellings are also very common. Sometimes the combination of misspelled words and poorly constructed sentences is so acute I have to email the person back and ask them to clarify their question before I even address the real problem.

But the really great thing about the emails above is that they give me no information with which to help them. "I can't find my family" isn't even a question, it's just a statement. And there could be any number of reasons why they are unable to find the information they want on the website. But without knowing what information they are even looking for (a surname would be nice), or what searching they have already tried, I can do nothing for them.

We get these emails so often that I have wondered what kind of mindreader these customers think I am. They seem to think that by looking at their email address and reading the urgency of their detailed message "I can't find my family," I will magically know how to find their great grandfather's grave (obviously that's what they're looking for), or their biological mother's current whereabouts, or their entire personal pedigree.

Oh, the bright lights that exist in the world.

Tips for emailing (or otherwise contacting) a customer service department:

1. Be specific about your questions, suggestions, or concerns.
2. Don't swear.
3. Tell them who you are. If you have an order or an account with the company, give them your order number or some sort of customer ID so that they can help you specifically.
4. Read stuff. You're literate--go online and check out the company's policies and FAQs. Chances are, they've already answered your question. (However, if you can't find the answer online, don't be aftraid to contact them about it. They are getting paid to help you.)
5. Proofread. Please.

New Favorite Sport--to Watch

Back in the 2002 Winter Olympics I discovered the awesomeness of curling, which often aired late late at night, (my favorite time to watch tv). Curling is great mainly because the people look so funny sweeping the ice. I mean, I'm sure that it requires skill and all that, but it's really sort of a ridiculous sport.

BMX biking, on the other hand, is a completely different kind of awesome. These athletes are crazy--they could potentially die mid-race (which I don't think is a concern in curling). I only caught two BMX races this Olympics, but they were amazing. I found the wipe-outs to be totally satisfying, and while I've never had an interest in extreme sports before this, if X Games ever comes here, I'm totally going.

So if you missed the BMX races this year, look for it in 2012. Definitely a great addition to the Olympics.

An Artistic Soul

My mom's birthday was last week, and my niece Rebecca wrote a poem about grandmas to commemorate the occasion. A natural-born artist (drama and all), this six-year-old stayed up very late the night before writing a multi-stanza free verse poem.

Here are the last two stanzas--the awesomest ones:

They [grandmas] have a big house
when they have lots of kids
and some go to college,
some go to kindergarten,
some go to second grade, some
go to happy places like
Chuck E Cheese, some go to
pre-school, some are brand-
new, some go to 8th grade,
some go to 1st grade.

After school they celebrate.
They say good-bye and then
they do fun games with you. Then
they have ice cream and say good night.

Basically, I just like the part about Chuck E Cheese. And the fact that it sort of just goes on and on without making a lot of sense.

Big Sigh of Relief

I'm starting a graduate program in linguistics one month from tomorrow. As most of you know, I did my undergraduate in English, which is a little bit different. And since it's been awhile since I took a linguistics class--or any class for that matter--I decided I might want to study up a little before school.

So back in about May, I pulled out all my old linguistics books and decided to start reviewing the textbook from one of my favorite courses, History of the English Language. The book is called A Biography of the English Language by C M Millward.

Now the author's name, "Millward," should have tipped me off to something because Millward just sounds like a really old, stuffy-type linguist, the kind with the monotone voice, she probably has the same haircut she wore in the sixties. Millward is also probably socially awkward since she spent all her time alone in her room studying runes and Old English pronunciation. She has probably read Beowulf aloud. To herself.

And to others--which is worse.

(There are actually a lot of "interesting" people in the linguistics world, and sometimes when I meet them, I question whether I really belong in this field. So much more comfortable with the English crowd.)

Now if I didn't take a hint from the author's name, I should have at least noticed the pale, split-pea-soup cover of the book. It doesn't exactly scream, "Read me! I'm fun!" (I would post an actual picture of the book here, but you would fall asleep looking at it.) Inside the book there are about five maps/diagrams and the rest is text. No pictures. No color. Just big chunks of text. Text that goes on and on and on forever.

I tried really hard to read A Biography of the English Language, but, frankly, I was bored out of my mind. And I had no idea what it was talking about. And I quit reading it, and ignored my linguistics studying for awhile.

But I was a little concerned about the fact that I am starting a graduate program in linguistics and the linguistics book I tried to read was pretty much death. I mean it would be at least slightly inconvenient to finally start graduate school and discover I don't even like subject.

However, a few months after my failed reading attempts, when the book was buried deep under a pile of clean/dirty clothes, I remembered a very important fact from my History of the English Language class: We didn't use the book.

We had the book, but we didn't actually use it very often. Our assignments and tests were lecture-based, and the lectures were really interesting.

With that wonderful idea in mind, I pulled out a different linguistics textbook earlier this week. Linguistics: An Introduction to Language and Communication. This textbook has not one, but four authors, all with interesting, or at least normal-person-sounding names like Adrian Akmajian and Ann K Farmer. I could be friends with them. The cover is bright yellow with blue and yellow designs on it. It's a pretty happy textbook. Many graphs and diagrams, some of which could almost be considered pictures. Still no color inside, but the brightness of the cover makes up for it.

And the really good news:

I started reading the book, and I love it. Chapter 2, "Morphology," is so fascinating. I'm actually looking forward to the exercises at the end of the chapter. I'm pretty sure I'm going to do awesome on them because I totally get this stuff. I'm actually registered for a morphology class this fall, and now I really excited for it.

So I really do like linguistics, and I really can study linguistics in graduate school.

Good to know.