Cargo Cults: Alive & Well
I don't mind admitting that I had never heard of a "
cargo cult" before I stumbled upon the following article from the BBC:
Cargo cult lives on in South Pacific. The concept is concurrently heart-warming, saddening, and hilarious. Basically, people (usually south pacific islanders) see modern stuff ("cargo") for the first time, assume it's from been sent from a divine being, and then spend all their time trying to get the being to send more. Here's an extract from the Wikipedia entry on the history of cargo cults:
The classic period of cargo cult activity was in the years during and after World War II. The vast amounts of war materiel that were airdropped on to islands during the Pacific campaign against the Empire of Japan necessarily meant drastic changes to the lifestyle of the islanders, many of whom had never seen Westerners or Japanese before. Manufactured clothing, medicine, canned food, tents weapons and other useful goods arrived in vast quantities to equip soldiers — and also the islanders who were their guides and hosts. With the end of the war the airbases were abandoned, and "cargo" was no longer being dropped.
In attempts to get cargo to fall by parachute or land in planes or ships again, islanders imitated the same practices they had seen the soldiers, sailors and airmen use. They carved headphones from wood, and wore them while sitting in fabricated control towers. They waved the landing signals while standing on the runways. They lit signal fires and torches to light up runways and lighthouses. The cultists thought that the foreigners had some special connection to their own ancestors, who were the only beings powerful enough to produce such riches.
In a form of sympathetic magic, many built life-size mockups of airplanes out of straw, and created new military style landing strips, hoping to attract more airplanes. Ultimately, though these practices did not bring about the return of the god-like airplanes that brought such marvelous cargo during the war, they did have the effect of eradicating the religious
practices that had existed prior to the war.
To cut a long story short, if you follow the link above to the article, you'll be able to read all about a cargo cult that's still going strong. Some of the people on this specific island worship an unknown American GI that they call "John Frum," but who many suspect was simply someone who introduced themselves as "John from America." I'm guessing that these folks are still using dialup.
die Rückkehr des Mistfinks
Alas, I am not the only avid blogger who has been struck gleichzeitig with a case of writer's block and a hopeless lack of free time. Funny how a 30 hour a week teaching job, 15 hour a week bartending job and four graduate classes can put a big damper on the whole do-whatever-you-please front. So it goes.
That said, my former not-so-productive self now feels a sense of completion after each day, having instilled the knowledge of a 'lesser' German (nach Lee...I'll get to that) in the fresh (but soon to be verwelkt) minds of young people.
Alas again, though I seem to be writing, I'm really just faking it, and my writer's block continues. I've simply taken up the soapbox to write a greeting and a brief response to Lee's 'Schwiezer Blog'. Lee indeed is not a Linguist, but he's generally a pretty sharp guy, and though generally you can't trust a country's population to know the whole truth about their language (test this by asking the average English speaker where their language came from), there usually is some truth to the popular myth. Whoever Lee did speak to is right that Swiss German did not undergo any of the second sound shift, which reached completion in the north, partial completion in central Germany, and didn't really even start in Switzerland. That said, it also never happened in Austria. The thing that makes certain varieties of Swiss really special, though, isn't the second sound shift, but nominal morpholog
y. We all know about those few words left in German that take a pesky weak -n or -e ending in the dative case (z.B. Bauer, Herr, etc.). Well, specifically in Valais, which is predominantly French-speaking, but which also has a very small and isolated German-speaking population, they have pretty much maintained the entire nominal morphology of Old High German. In a way we could say they are the Icelandic of continental Europe because their language has remained nearly untouched by major sound shifts and borrowings (save of course some French influx), along with any morphological loss of complexity. Screw the aspirated 'k' and 'li' endings...I think this is the real fascinating stuff. All that said, though, being a Linguist also means looking only descriptively at a language, so I'm am loath to give anyone any respect when they begin attaching value judgements to languages or language varieties. This has been going on since the beginning of time and has really only been used either for purposes of discrimination, propaganda, or to fool oneself into believing one is superior to another. That's another story, altogether, though, so I step down from the box of soap...
But so my students just don't have the same excitement level as Lee's. No backflips, no speed reading, not even a freaking septum piercing in my class. I thought this was the time for young adults to test the boundaries of their personalities and inner selves. The most clever thing I've seen in the last week was that one of my students was clever enough to come up with G6 when I asked them to come up with team names for a little translation competition. Yes, there are six people in their group. So when I told the little bastard that may not be entirely appropriate he comes back at me with Gruppe6. I told him to let me know when his testicles drop.
Google Sketch-Up
I started using Google Sketch-Up (
which can be downloaded for free here) during class because, as anyone who's ever sat behind me knows, I've pretty much exhausted MS paint as a medium. Sketch-Up is a pretty sophisticated design program that lets you create models in 3D. After messing about with a few buildings and abstract shapes, I set my sights on creating a racing yacht. This is the result, click on it to learn more. If you do get sketch-up, which is totally sweet, you can download my boat into it and mess around with it, rotate it, change it, whatever.
Stet Offensive
If you're familiar with Harper's magazine, you know that they have a section up front titled "Readings" in which they publish interesting or amusing pieces, often excerpts. In the current issue (Feb 2007), one of the readings is titled "Stet Offensive" and reprints some of the Q&As that have been posted on the Chicago Manual of Style website. They're super sweet and I got quite the giggle out of them. Admittedly I'd enjoyed a sherry or two at the time, but I think it's still worth reading.
Question: When I began learning English grammar from the nuns in or about 1951, I was taught to NEVER use a comma either after or before independent clauses or compound sentences. Did the rules of English grammar and punctuation change while I was in that three-week coma in 1965 or in the years that it took to regain my basic and intellectual functioning before I returned to teaching?
Answer: I’m sorry I can’t account for your state of mind, but standard punctuation calls for a comma before a conjunction that joins two independent clauses unless the clauses are very short. Please see
CMOS 6.32. I would go further and suggest that it’s a good idea to reexamine any rule you were taught that includes the word “never” or “always.”
Question:The menu in our cafeteria shows that enchiladas are available “Tues.–Fri.” However, when I ordered one on a Wednesday, I was informed that enchiladas are available on Tuesday AND Friday, not Tuesday THROUGH Friday. When I informed the cafeteria manager that this was incorrect, she seemed shocked and refused to change the sign. Please help determine who is correct!
Answer: Although the sign was incorrect, I’m not sure you should annoy the person who provides the enchiladas.
Question: My question is, is there any standard for the usage of emoticons? In particular, is there an accepted practice for the use of emoticons that include an opening or closing parenthesis as the final token within a set of parentheses? Should I (1) incorporate the emoticon into the closing of the parentheses (giving a dual purpose to the closing parenthesis, such as in this case. :-) (2) simply leave the emoticon up against the closing parenthesis, ignoring the bizarre visual effect of the doubled closing parenthesis (as I am doing here, producing a doubled-chin effect :-)) (3) put a space or two between the emoticon and the closing parenthesis (like this: :-) ) (4) or avoid the situation by using a different emoticon (Some emoticons are similar. :-D), placing the emoticon elsewhere, or doing without it (i.e., reword to avoid awkwardness)?
Answer: Until academic standards decline enough to accommodate the use of emoticons, I’m afraid
CMOS is unlikely to treat their styling, since the manual is aimed primarily at scholarly publications. And the problems you’
ve posed in this note give us added incentive to keep our distance. (But I kind of like that double-chin effect.)
Question: Is there an acceptable way to form the possessive of words such as Macy’s and
Sotheby’s? Sometimes rewording to avoid the possessive results in less felicitous writing.
Answer: Less felicitous than “
Sotheby’s’s”? I don’t think so.
Question: A friend and I were looking at a poster that read “guys apartment.” I believe it should read “guys’ apartment.” She claims that it should read “guys’s apartment” and that the
CMOS specifically gives the example of “guys’s” to make “guys” possessive. I looked through every section on possessives and did not find the word “guys’s” or any rule that would make this correct. Some people say “you guys’s apartment”—did I overlook the word “guys’s” as used in the attributive position? (I don’t think I did.)
Answer: “Guys’s” is acceptable in the way that “
youse guys” is acceptable; that is, neither is yet recognized as standard prose, and if your friend can find it in
CMOS, I’ll eat my hat. Plural nouns that end in s (like “guys”) don’t add another s to form the possessive, e.g., the students’ lounge. “Guys’ apartment” is the standard spelling. If you want to make “guys” attributive, you can get away without the apostrophe, but you might test the idea with a plural noun that
doesn’t end in s to see whether the attributive actually works: I doubt you’d write “the women apartment,” so you
shouldn’t write “the guys apartment” either. And shame on your friend. It must make you wonder what else she’s capable of.
Question: Oh, English-language gurus, is it ever proper to put a question mark and an exclamation mark at the end of a sentence in formal writing? This author is giving me a fit with some of her overkill emphases, and now there is this sentence that has both marks at the end. My everlasting gratitude for letting me know what I should tell this person.
Answer: In formal writing, we allow both marks only in the event that the author was being physically assaulted while writing. Otherwise, no.
I don't mind admitting that I had never heard of a "cargo cult" before I stumbled upon the following article from the BBC: Cargo cult lives on in South Pacific. The concept is concurrently heart-warming, saddening, and hilarious. Basically, people (usually south pacific islanders) see modern stuff ("cargo") for the first time, assume it's from been sent from a divine being, and then spend all their time trying to get the being to send more. Here's an extract from the Wikipedia entry on the history of cargo cults:
practices that had existed prior to the war.
