The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax
by Geoffrey K. Pullum
Sections:
- Prologue: the TOPIC ... COMMENT column
Part I Fashion and Tendencies.
- Watch out for the current.
- The stranger in the bar
- If it's Tuesday, this must be glossematics
- The conduct of Linguistic Inquiry
- Chomsky on the Enterprise
- Formal linguistics meets the Boojum
Part II Publication and Damnation.
- Stalking the perfect journal
- Punctuation and human freedom
- A guest of the State
- Seven deadly sins in journal publishing
- The linguistics of defamation
- Trench-mouth comes to Trumpington Street
- Here come the linguistic fascists
Part III Unscientific Behavior.
- The revenge of the methodological moaners
- Footloose and context-free
- Nobody goes around at LSA meeting offering odds
- Citation etiquette beyond Thunderdome
- The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax
Part IV Linguistic Fantasies.
- No trips to Stockholm
- A memo from the Vice Chancellor
- Some lists of things about books
- The incident of the node vortex problem
- Epilogue: The Final Curtain
Chapters:
The articles have enough jargon to let you know that they are not intended for the general reader.
But that never stopped me from reading a funny book.
Some key quotes for some of the chapters follow.
Foreword by James D. McCawley
1. Prologue: the TOPIC ... COMMENT column
2. Watch out for the current
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"The point of being plugged in [plugged-in??] is to get current,
but it is important not to forget that the current may be alternating."
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3. The stranger in the bar
Defines linguistics to Everywoman by:
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"Suppose you wanted to program a computer to understand plain English,
like the HAL 9000 computer in Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Linguistics is the subject that figures out what you'd need to know about language
in order to do that, for English or for any other language, in a general and theoretically principled way."
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And on the importance of linguistics:
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"My sleep was uneasy that night.
I kept imagining a world laid waste by a war that started because of a mistake in the
semantic rule for relative clauses that led to a misinterpretation of a missile launch report."
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4. If it's Tuesday, this must be glossematics
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"We are all striving toward the elusive right way to teach our subject,
and it would be arrogant and foolish to pretend there is a simplistic
recipe for the perfect course"
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5. The conduct of Linguistic Inquiry
Introductory paragraphs include a full-monty satirical rant:
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"Perhaps it is not too late for me to atone, by making it clear that I regard
Linguistic Inquiry
as a miserable trash-stuffed rag of a journal through which
the pathetic blitherings of an army of knuckle-dragging
intellectual toadies are shepherded to prominence by a pea-brained lackwit of an editor
whose fawning subservience tot he power clique that controls modern linguistics
is matched only by his contempt for civilized standards when dealing with the work of those
... I can't imagine, frankly, why I still subscribe."
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6. Chomsky on the Enterprise
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"What I plan to do is to produce a book in which new contributions to
significant debates by people who were unable to participate in the original
are grafted in at appropriate points. My first foray into this field, ...
will be appearing shortly, if I can succeed in finding a publisher a little less
lily-livered than my first fifteen choices have turned out to be.
I want to use this column to give a preview of this
important and innovative work."
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7. Formal linguistics meets the Boojum
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"I try not to take things too seriously...
My fear is that formal linguistics in the true sense
will disappear from our profession completely, in the USA and probably the entire world,
hence the whole solar system and perhaps the cosmos."
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8. Stalking the perfect journal
9. Punctuation and human freedom
Aha!!! While this article is full of the peevish Pullum's pet peeves,
it is clearly a BRILLIANT and UNBIASED column because he supports my pet peeve and
Saint Pullum
is therefore
awarded Patron Sainthood of Punctuation.
From p.69:
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The copy-editor will insist that when a sentence ends with a quotation,
the closing quotation mark must follow the punctuation mark.
I say this must stop.
Linguists have a duty to the public to use their expertise in arguing for changes to the fabric
of society when its interests are threatened.
And we have such a situation here.
... many cultures show no signs of the superstitious awe with which we regard copy-editors.
... No copy editor should have the right to switch the order of two punctuation marks when it can change truth conditions."
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10. A guest of the State
11. Seven deadly sins in journal publishing
12. The linguistics of defamation
13. Trench-mouth comes to Trumpington Street
14. Here come the linguistic fascists
It takes one to know one.
15. The revenge of the methodological moaners
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"In this piece I rail against the tendency of linguists to write about
the philosophy of science as applied to their subject instead of writing about
what languages are like"
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16. Footloose and context-free
17. Nobody goes around at LSA meeting offering odds
18. Citation etiquette beyond Thunderdome
19. The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax
His introduction explains:
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"A silly, infuriating unscholarly piece, designed to mislead"
is what one irate but anonymous senior scholar called this chapter when it was first published in NTTL.
But that is not correct; rather, what I have written here is
a silly, misleading unscholarly piece, designed to infuriate. [Ah!]
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And as for the vocabulary:
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C. W. Schultz-Lorentzen's Dictionary of the West Greenlandic Eskimo Language (1927)
gives just two possible relevant roots:
qanik, meaning 'snow in the air' or 'snowflake', [note the comma position, hooray]
an aput, meaning 'show on the ground'. Then add that you would be interested
to know if the speaker can cite any more. This will not make you the most popular person in the room.
... But it will strike a blow for truth, responsibility, and
standards of evidence in linguistics.
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His end note explains:
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I want to make one last effort to clarify that the chapter above
isn't about Eskimo lexicography at all, though I'm sure it will be taken to be.
What it's actually about is intellectual sloth.
...
The tragedy is not that so many people got the facts wildly wrong;
it is that in the mentally lazy and anti-intellectual world we live in today,
hardly anyone cares enough to think about trying to determine
what the facts are.
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20. No trips to Stockholm
21. A memo from the Vice Chancellor
22. Some lists of things about books
23. The incident of the node vortex problem
24. Epilogue: The Final Curtain
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The magnitude 7.1 earthquake that struck directly at the heart of the TOPIC ... COMMENT
organization at 5:04 on October 17, 1989, finally convinced me that perhaps discretion was the
better part of valor, and that having inflicted my opinions and fantasies on the
linguistics community for seven years, it was now time to quit.
Obviously, I thought, the planet is offended and has begun to take its revenge.
It is time for me to get out while I still can.
I was prepared to stand up indefinitely to the disapproval of virtually all linguists
of taste and discernment,
but not to take this kind of geophysical abuse.
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