In the Andaman Islands are several small and long-isolated human populations, including one that is, as far as I know, the most isolated human group of them all: the few hundred people living on North Sentinel Island.

One of these populations, as of last week, no longer exists. The last of the Bo-speaking subtribes of the Great Andamanese culture, a woman named Boa Sr (don’t ask me how to pronounce it), has died at the age of 85 or so. The language, which represented a chain of cultural transmission that may have been as much as 70,000 years old, has died with her.

Read this poignant story here. Don’t miss the audio clip.

Thoughtopsy: in which you try to determine what the hell you could possibly have been thinking.

I don’t want to seem peevish, but will somebody please tell me when speaking “about” a topic became speaking “to” it? Does this preening, pompous little affectation bother any of the rest of you as much as it does me?

I am having terrible troubles with my computer (an HP dvr9000 series laptop), and it will need to be replaced. It crashes often — I can now expect to get only ten or fifteen minutes at a time out of it — and it it takes several attempts to get it to restart. So cranky is it tonight (and as a result, so cranky am I), that I have given up on trying to do any serious writing. I got a late start this evening anyway: the lovely Nina and I spend most of the afternoon at the spectacular and uplifting Vassily Kandinsky show at the Guggenheim, and this evening we took our son, who is heading off in a few days for his final semester of college, out to dinner.

So for tonight, then, a brief and enjoyable item (and high time; the mood has gotten altogether too dark and negative around here lately).

For several years I have had on my sidebar a link to a website called Language Log, and for at least the last two of them I have neglected to visit. My good friend Jess Kaplan wrote to me yesterday, however, to point out a couple of items there that he had just enjoyed, and that got me back in the door. I had forgotten what an outstanding blog it is.

For tonight, then, we direct you to a fine pair of posts (here and here) explaining why Dan Brown, the author of The Da Vinci Code, is probably the worst prose stylist ever to make a living writing books (even that title contains a gaffe), and an item examining the relative frequency of “you know” vs. “I mean”. But don’t stop there. This is a site that is curiously difficult to navigate away from.

A few weeks back there was an interesting article by Natalie Angier in the science section of the Times, about a familiar word whose meaning, as it turns out, is not at all clear.

The word is “behavior”; specifically the sense of the word that applies to what living creatures do. Although there are entire academic fields that have the word in their names, it appears that just what constitutes “behavior” is rather a difficult question for even the boffins themselves to answer.

The question was brought to the floor by Daniel Levitis, a teaching assistant at Berkeley. We read:

Daniel Levitis was working as a teaching assistant for an animal behavior course at the University of California in Berkeley, and on the first day of class, the professor explained that the shorthand definition of a “behavior” is “what animals do.”

O.K., that’s the freshman-friendly definition, Mr. Levitis thought. Now how about the unabridged, professional version? What is the point-by-point definition of a behavior that behavioral biologists use when judging whether a particular facet of the natural world falls under their purview? After all, animals digest food and grow fur, yet few behavioral researchers would count such physiological and anatomical doings as behaviors.

Mr. Levitis asked the professor for the full definition of a behavior. She referred him to their textbook, with its promising title, “Animal Behavior.” To his surprise, neither that textbook nor any other reference he consulted bothered to spell it out. “It was assumed that everyone knew what the word meant,” said Mr. Levitis, who is completing his doctorate at Berkeley.

His interest piqued, Mr. Levitis investigated with a survey of professionals:

To perform their linguistic investigation, the researchers composed an online survey with two basic parts. In the first, they presented 13 “potentially diagnostic” statements about behavior, compiled from their sweep through the scientific literature, with which respondents could either concur or not. “Behavior always involves movement,” for example, and “is always an action, rather than a lack of action.” Or, “behaviors are always the actions of individuals, not groups” and “something whole individuals do, not organs or parts that make up an individual.” Or, “a developmental change is not a behavior.”

In the second part, Mr. Levitis and his co-workers offered 20 instances of natural phenomena and asked, Behavior, yea, nay or can’t say? “A sponge pumps water to gather food,” for example, or “a plant bends its leaves toward a light source” or “a beetle is swept away by a strong current.” Does a flock of geese flying in V formation count as a behavior? How about when a person decides not to do anything tomorrow in the event of rain, or when a female ant that is physiologically capable of laying eggs doesn’t do so because she’s not a queen? (If you’d like to take the survey and see how your responses compare with scientists’ and other readers’, please go to nytimes.com/science. Warning, spoilers ahead.)

Nearly all of the items were designed as borderline cases that tested the validity of one or more statements in the first half of the survey. “Flocks of geese fly in V formation,” for instance, contradicted the notion that behaviors are the actions of individuals rather than of groups. A person deciding on inactivity in the event of rain and an ant forgoing reproduction because she’s not royalty both flouted the premise that a behavior is always an action. One offering, “a spider builds a web,” contradicted none of the 13 stipulations about behavior and thus served as an experimental control.

The results showed little, if any, agreement amongst those who participated, and often evoked inconsistencies even amongst answers given by a single respondent.

If this vagueness and inconsistency of meaning is possible even with a familiar term used by professional scientists to refer to the very subject of their expertise, it seems naively optimistic to imagine that very much of human discourse consists of a meaning in one interlocutor’s mind being faithfully transferred to, and subsequently represented in, another’s.

Indeed, Mr. Levitis’s project points out that the problem runs far deeper than the failure of language to provide a reliable channel for transferring precise meanings from one mind to another; it reminds us that even within ourselves the labels and concepts that, taken together, provide the scaffolding upon which our world-picture is erected are not the solid objects, the sturdy posts and beams, we imagine them to be, but are, rather, nothing more than diffuse and amorphous nebulae of associations. Though we often imagine that language is essential to the organization of our storehouse of concepts and ideas — indeed, it is hard for us to imagine how we could have meaningful concepts at all without language to give them definite form — it begins to seem that what we have instead is a collection of familiar terms, like “behavior”, that point not to anything solid, but into a mass of clouds. And although we humans can easily — blithely, glibly — share the words, each of has his own personal cloudscape, unique and irremediably private, and available even for our own introspection only with sustained and quite unnatural effort. We do not know ourselves; we do not understand most of the things we think we know; and to imagine that we really understand anyone else must surely be little more than a comforting fantasy. We roll words around in our minds, and pass them around amongst ourselves, but really we are far more alone than we imagine.

Read the article here.

In grappling with persistent questions regarding key aspects of human existence and the natural world — intentionality, free will, morality, and so on — it is very easy to become entangled in terminological difficulties. Here’s a particularly contentious example.

Reading the New York Times the other day, I noticed the following in an Op-Ed piece by Nicholas Kristof about moral types:

“Minds are very hard things to open, and the best way to open the mind is through the heart,” Professor Haidt says. “Our minds were not designed by evolution to discover the truth; they were designed to play social games.”

“Professor Haidt” is the psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who has done extensive research into the orgins and underpinnings of human morality.

Here’s another quote, from Harvard’s Steven Pinker:

The moral design of nature is as bungled as its engineering design.

And here’s Stephen Jay Gould:

In the domain of organisms and their good designs, we have little reason to doubt the strong, probably dominant influence of deterministic forces like natural selection.

Here’s a biology text from the University of Chicago Press: The Evolution of Vertebrate Design.

From the abstract of a lecture given this month by the American Society of Cell Biology:

Familiar features help to elucidate the origins, functions and design parameters for the secretory pathway, endosymbiotic organelles, the cytoskeleton, and cell cycle control.

Here’s the title of a paper from the Journal of Mammalogy:

Allometric scaling of body length : Elastic or geometric similarity in mammalian design.

Here’s another scholarly paper, from the University of Bonn:

The biomechanical design and morphofunctional evolution of presacral vertebrae in Sauropodomorpha deduced from shape analysis and FESS.

What do all these quotations have in common? The word “design”.

When biologists use this word to describe the bodies of living creatures, they obviously have something different in mind than a pre-Darwinian speaker of English would. While both would use it to describe intricate assemblages of working parts that perform some function, the difference is that the modern, technical usage of the term carries no implication of teleology, of having been assembled by an intentional designer for a preordained purpose. In the evolution of life there are no Aristotelian “final causes”, no “skyhooks” lifting the process from above. In short: design sans Designer; design not by purposeful plan, but by natural process. But the use of the word seems apt enough otherwise; it certainly feels appropriate, for example, to look at an albatross’s body as an exquisitely designed flying machine.

To use the word in this way — even though those who do so quite explicitly understand that when they say “design” they have in mind a concept cleanly filleted of all teleology, as what is effectively an instance of technical jargon — remains nevertheless a source of philosophical vexation in some quarters. One of those quarters is the popular website The Maverick Philosopher, where the host, Dr William Vallicella, has devoted more than a few comments and posts lately to this very topic, for example this recent item.

This persistent inconsistency in the way the word “design” is understood is extremely unhelpful, and I see no sign of its being resolved anytime soon. (Another word similiarly fraught with confusion and disagreement is the word “for”; there are many intelligent and philosophically sophisticated people who maintain, for example, that our eyes, since they lack a conscious designer, and were shaped solely by evolution, are not “for” seeing.)

Daniel Dennett, who is himself rather a polarizing figure in these discussions, has made quite clear what “design” ought to mean in light of our radical new (and at 150 years old, very recent indeed, in the timeline of human thought and language) insights into the process by which living things, and indeed intentionality, have arrived on the scene. In a 2005 paper, Atheism and Evolution (which is well worth your time, and available here), Dennett writes:

A designed thing, then, is either a living thing or a part of a living thing, or the artifact of a living thing[.]

This seems almost exactly right to me, with one quibble: it is not quite general enough. This engine of design discovered by Darwin and Wallace will work with not only living things, but with anything that meets the essential qualifications: replication with variation, along with some sort of differential selection amongst the variants. It happens that living things are the only such replicators we know of at the moment, but the process does not strictly require life. (Indeed, at the close of Dennett’s article he talks about Lee Smolin’s provocative idea (see here) that universes themselves may be subject to such a process, replicating themselves by way of black holes.)

But the point is: a definition of the word “design” that does not include the process that created the staggeringly intricate designs of living things is simply inadequate. Such a definition rules out of court, by mere terminological fiat, nearly all of the design in the world, leaving only the tiny remnant, childishly crude by comparison, that we humans have managed. This absurd philosophical convention — and it is nothing more than that — is due, I maintain, to an atavistic, anthropocentric fixation on conscious agency, and in particular an obdurate resistance to the idea of intentionality as an objective feature of the natural world, and an equally dogmatic unwillingness to decouple the ideas of intentionality and consciousness.

Dennett continues:

Darwin’s “strange inversion of reasoning” was in fact a new and wonderful way of thinking, completely overturning the mind-first way that even David Hume had been unable to cast aside, and replacing it with a bubble-up vision in which intelligence — the concentrated, forward-looking intelligence of an anthropomorphic agent — emerges as just one of the products of mindless, mechanistic processes. These processes are fueled by untold billions of pointless, undesigned collisions, some vanishing small fraction of which fortuitously lead to tiny improvements in the lineages in which they occur. Thanks to Darwin’s principle of “descent with modification,” these ruthlessly tested design innovations accumulate over the eons, yielding breathtakingly brilliant designs that never had a designer — other than the purposeless, distributed process of natural selection itself.

The signatures of these unplanned innovations are everywhere to be found in a close examination of the marvels of nature, in the inside-out retina of the vertebrate eye, the half-discarded leftovers in the genes and organs of every species, the prodigious wastefulness and apparent cruelty of so many of nature’s processes. These departures from wisdom, frozen accidents, in the apt phrase of Francis Crick, confront the theist with a dilemma: if God is responsible for these designs, then His intelligence looks disturbingly like human obtuseness and callousness. Moreover, as our understanding of the mechanisms of evolution grows, we can sketch out ever more detailed accounts of the historical sequence of events by which the design innovations appeared and were incorporated into the branching tree of genomes. A voluminously predictive account of the creative process is now emerging, replete with thousands of mutually supporting details, and no contradictions at all. As the pieces of this mega-jigsaw-puzzle fall into place with increasing rapidity, there can be no reasonable doubt that it is, in all its broad outlines if not yet in all its unsettled details, the true story of how all living things came to have the designs we observe.

Dennett responds also to the pervasive prejudice that sees “mere” matter, and the “mindless” processes of Nature, as somehow too lowly to have produced something as exalted as we:

Between the richly detailed and ever-ramifying evolutionary story, and the featureless mystery of God the creator of all creatures great and small, there is no contest. This is a momentous reversal for the ancient conviction that God’s existence can be read off the wonders of nature. Anyone who has ever been struck by the magnificent intricacy of design and prodigious variety of the living world and wondered what–if not God–could possibly account for its existence must now confront not just a plausible alternative, but an alternative of breathtaking explanatory power supported by literally thousands of confirmed predictions and solved puzzles. Richard Dawkins has put the point crisply: “Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” (1986, p. 6).

Undermining the best argument anybody ever thought of for the existence of God is not, of course, proving the non-existence of God, and many careful thinkers who have accepted evolution by natural selection as the explanation of the wonders of the living world have cast about for other supports for their continuing belief in God. The idea of treating Mind as an effect rather than as a First Cause is too revolutionary for some. Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer with Darwin of natural selection, could never accept the full inversion, proclaiming that “the marvelous complexity of forces which appear to control matter, if not actually to constitute it, are and must be mind-products.” (quoted by [Stephen Jay] Gould, [The Flamingo's Smile,] 1985, p.397.) More recently, the physicist Paul Davies, in his book, The Mind of God (1992, p.232), opines that the reflective power of human minds can be “no trivial detail, no minor by-product of mindless purposeless forces.” This is a most revealing way of expressing a familiar denial, for it betrays an ill-examined prejudice. Why, we might ask Davies, would its being a by-product of mindless, purposeless forces make it trivial? Why couldn’t the most important thing of all be something that arose from unimportant things? Why should the importance or excellence of anything have to rain down on it from on high, from something more important, a gift from God? Darwin’s inversion suggests that we abandon that presumption and look for sorts of excellence, of worth and purpose, that can emerge, bubbling up out of “mindless, purposeless forces.”

The community of evolutionary scientists and philosophers are already untroubled by the use of “design” in the broader sense that I am defending here; it might be seen, perhaps, as having been appropriated as technical language, in the way that many ordinary English words have been taken up in other technical fields. (Also, it is common for words to become more inclusive over time: for example, the word “guitar” once meant only what we would now refer to with the retronym “classical guitar” — the present argument over the use of “design” is rather like having a debate with a purist over whether my Stratocaster is really a “guitar” at all.) But so stubborn is the resistance to this broadening of the meaning of the word that I think we simply need a new one.

Any suggestions?

New words appear in our language almost every day. Sometimes, like a lovely wildflower or sturdy oak, they are welcome additions to the lexical landscape, delighting the rambler who encounters them for the first time. Some of these neologisms, however, produce an effect more like rounding a bend in the trail only to find a ruptured bag of garbage, or severed human foot. In a depressing item in today’s news, I have encountered just such a word: “weisure”.

This ghastly coinage describes a grim reality of modern life: the increasingly blurred line between work and leisure. The article’s author seems to see this as a sign of progress; I certainly do not. We read:

What happened? Why do Americans want to mix work and play? Well, first, there’s more work and less play, according to Conley’s book “Elsewhere, U.S.A.”

“For the first time in history now, the higher up the economic ladder you go, the more likely you’re going to have an extremely long workweek,” he says. These busier Americans often want to save time by taking care of business and pleasure simultaneously.

Ah, business and pleasure, simultaneously. What a blessing!

Indeed, why stop there? Readers are advised to be on the lookout for “wex”, “wefecation”, “wisease”, “wemotherapy”, and, if the wemotherapy doesn’t work out, perhaps even a stay in a “wospice”.

Today, according to this item, is Talk Like Shakespeare Day (i’faith, I had no idea). However, the clay-brained, knotty-pated flirt-gill who composed the headline for the link at CNN’s main page needs some remedial instruction, methinks. The text says, imperatively, “Speaketh Boldly on ‘Talk Like Shakespeare Day’” — but “speaketh” (and the ‘-eth’ suffix generally) is only an appropriate form for the third person, according to the Columbia Guide to Standard American English, which advises us to “use it correctly or not at all”.

I suppose, in a more generous mood, I might have borne it with a patient shrug, but suff’rance is not the badge of my tribe.

[Update: We get results, it seems; the headline has been corrected, and now says "Unleash thy inner bard".]

It’s time to leave immigration aside, and get back to our usual business; the past few days have given us enough to mull over for quite a while.

Here, then is a project behind which waka waka waka can throw its enthusiastic and unambiguous support: Save The Words.

Both John McCain and Barack Obama gave fine speeches last night. Mr. McCain gave an honorable and gentlemanly address that was untainted by bitterness, and Mr. Obama’s speech was both sober and uplifting. I must comment on one thing in particular, before I am scooped by all the language mavens out there: Mr. Obama’s phrase “the enormity of the task that lies ahead”.

The word enormity refers, in careful usage, not to hugeness, but to monstrosity of evil — as in “the world stood aghast at the enormity of Germany’s crimes”. I was startled to hear Mr. Obama, who is very careful with language, and who obviously put a great deal of effort into this speech, use this word. I wonder if he meant to.

There is a mode of locution known as the Sports Present: one hears it often, and almost exclusively, during broadcasts of athletic competitions. It is employed, when discussing some action that has just taken place on the field, to point out that had something in the execution gone differently, a different result would have ensued.

For example: imagine that a running-back, having broken free in midfield, has just been dragged to the ground at the five-yard line after a long and promising sprint. Our announcer, having glimpsed in his mind’s eye some neighboring “possible worlds”, offers the following counterfactual analysis:

“If Csonka breaks that tackle, it’s six points for Miami!”

That’s the Sports Present.

Anyway, this evening I passed through the room in which my lovely Nina was taking in one of the political chat shows. The topic of discussion was the recent endorsement of Barack Obama by the noted GOP statesman Colin Powell (whose name, by the way, I find it terribly difficult to pronounce as “colon”, though that seems, sadly, to be the way he likes it). I heard one of the panelists, commenting on the timing of the endorsement, say “If Powell makes that endorsement during the Democratic Convention…”

“Hey, that’s the Sports Present!” I remarked to the memsahib, who said nothing at all in response, having had more than enough of this sort of thing from me to last her several consecutive lifetimes. I thought it was odd, though, for a political commentator to be expressing himself in such an esoteric idiom, and squinted at the screen to see who might have said it.

Everything fell comfortingly into place a moment later when I recognized the talking head as belonging to none other than Lynn Swann, the great Pittsburgh Steelers receiver who has, since hanging up his cleats, made a political and broadcasting career for himself as that oddest of social curiosities, a black Republican.

The world is a confusing and mysterious place, and one must savor the rare moments when small things make sense. It could have gone the other way, after all: if that’s James Carville making that remark about the convention, I’m punting.

With a hat tip to Kevin Kim, here is a wonderful example of the power of punctuation to alter the meaning of written English.

I haven’t ranted about the decline of the English language in quite a while, but I do find myself vexed almost to the point of irritability by a particularly gruesome verbal tic that seems more and more in fashion. I refer, of course, to the increasingly common use of the word “myself” as a nonreflexive pronoun. You hear it all the time lately, in sentences like:

    ”The director has asked Zoltan and myself to oversee the completion of the TPS reports.”

    ”Readers may direct comments either to Wally Stunkard or myself.”

This is an abomination. You don’t give something to “myself”, I do. You give something to me. The purpose of a reflexive pronoun is to serve as the object on occasions when the subject and object are the same, as in:

     “After I had dealt with Carol and her lover, I turned the blowtorch on myself.”

    ”I decided to treat myself to an evening of gangsta rap and a large bowl of offal.”

I realize that there is a great deal of suffering in the world, and that perhaps we have more pressing matters to grieve us. But this sort of thing really drives myself up the wall.

In today’s New York Times we see, in response to an article about the difficulties faced by working diabetics and their employers, the following letter (it’s number six in the linked collection):

To the Editor:

Thank you for your article. But you do a disservice to all those with diabetes by referring to them as “diabetics.” We are not our diseases; we are individuals with lives and families. Such a reference is demeaning and promotes just the discrimination you were reporting.

We are all aware, of course, that diabetes is only a disease, and that those who suffer from it possess other attributes as well. In the article under discussion, however, the individuals chosen for consideration were selected precisely because of the salient characteristic they share — namely, that they do indeed suffer from this cruel affliction — and the word “diabetic” summarizes this distinction with precision and economy. The use of the term in such a context should not be seen by those with diabetes as diminishing their humanity — which, as nobody should have any reason to doubt, is surely as dignified and multifaceted as anyone else’s — and to eschew it in favor of some euphemistic monstrosity such as “the pancreatically challenged” would serve only to draw another pint from a language and culture that are already well on their way to becoming quite utterly bloodless.

I have seen firsthand the suffering diabetes can cause, and sincerely mean no disrespect to its victims. But the letter’s author might do well to read this post, by the noted curmudgeon Deogolwulf.

Recently I was given a century-old copy of the immense Merriam-Webster International Dictionary of the English Language. This 1906 edition’s title page continues:

The book begins with a series of full-page color plates. Sadly, the first two are missing, but we still have the Great Seals of the United States and Territories, Coats of Arms of Various Nations, and several others, including the most necessary of all, Club Flags of United States Yachts.

This is a fantastic linguistic time-capsule, and I’m thrilled to have it. Particularly interesting is the Supplement, which is a listing of now-commonplace words that had only just entered the language, such as telegraphophone (an instrument for making a telephonic record at a distance), and bunting iron (a pontee). But best of all are the thousands of words I simply did not know, and the lost meanings of more familiar words. A sampling:

• nullah-nullah: a kind of club used by the Australian aborigines.
• oberration: a wandering about.
• crimp: easily crumbled.
• screable: capable of being spit out.
• rabblement:: a tumultuous crowd of low people.
• blobber-lipped: having thick lips.
• axinomancy: a species of divination, by an ax or hatchet.
• laughing-bird: the yaffle.
• fulgurous: emitting lightning.
• contratabular: existing or done against, or contrary to, a will or testament.
• gumsucker: a white person born in Victoria, or, less exactly, in any part of Australia.

I could go on and on, of course, but it’s late, and I have a horrid day tomorrow. I’ll just have to sprinkle these about as the opportunity arises.

We’ve all heard the suggestion that a roomful of monkeys hammering randomly away at typewriters would, given billions of years, recreate the complete works of Shakespeare. [A "typewriter", for those of you whose brows are wrinkled solely by bafflement, is an antique mechanical device that generated crumpled sheets of paper.] It’s an interesting idea, but if you’re like me, you’ve just been too busy to try it out.

Well, the wait is over. Take a look at this. It’s not exactly instant gratification; thus far the sedulous simian simulacra have only got as far as the first 24 letters from “Henry IV, Part II”. But, as someone once said, “how poor are they that have not patience.”

Yesterday’s New York Times ran a story about a website called Language Log, which I visited at once and had a hard time leaving. There is even a special introductory post written just for all the new visitors that came by as result of Monday’s article.

If you love English, you’ll love this blog. Onto the sidebar it goes.

I have to share this, which comes to me by way of Eugene Jen.

Bon appétit.

I wonder how many of you have ever read any S. J. Perelman, or even know the name. He was pretty much a household world, at least in New York and Hollywood, in his heyday, but fewer and fewer people that I mention him to even seem to know who he was.

Sidney Joseph Perelman, who was born in 1904 and died in 1979, was a humorist and screenwriter, who was perhaps best known as a regular contributor to The New Yorker. He also co-wrote the screenplays for the Marx Brothers films Monkey Business and Horsefeathers, and the film Around the World in Eighty Days, which won an Academy Award.

Perelman’s forte was the comic short story, and in my opinion he was the best ever at this delightful form. His great gift was his astonishing virtuosity of language. He had an immense vocabulary, and no other writer (save perhaps his English counterpart, the great P.G. Wodehouse) could touch him for playful sophistication. Often the seed of his stories would be some found object – a newspaper headline or snip of text from a magazine – and from that he would confect an imaginary back-story a few pages long; just a perfect little bon-bon to lighten one’s weary lot. He was an enormous influence on Woody Allen, whose humorous writings are simply tributes to Perelman’s incomparable body of work.

I particularly enjoy the paragraphs that open his stories. Some samples below:

“Please don’t give it another thought!” I shouted at my vis-à-vis over the uproar of the cocktail party. “It’s perfectly all right!”

“I can’t hear you!” she shouted back, her nose wrinkling in frustration. “What did you say?” She was an angular hyper-thyroid in green herringbone, with a fur piece slung across her jib, and we stood glued to one another amid the crush like lovers in an Indian erotic sculpture, but without the intimacy. My left sleeve, down which she had just emptied two-thirds of her highball, was waterlogged, and a fearful premonition gripped me that I might spend eternity bonded to this afreet unless some miracle intervened. Providentially, it did; somewhere in the hurly-burly a drunk sagged to the floor, the axis of the party shifted, and I found myself confronting Stanley Prang.

- from A Soft Answer Turneth Away Royalties

Had you been a turkey buzzard lazily circling over Tinicum Township in eastern Bucks County last Friday – a possibility, by the way, that shouldn’t be excluded until you can establish proof to the contrary – you might have observed beneath your talons the prelude to a dramatic event that occurred later that morning. A portly householder whose nose resembled an exploded boysenberry was engaged in clearing away the snow piled against the entrance of his stone dwelling, his pulses throbbing in the dry, frosty air like the royal Watusi drums. One two, one two, the shovel flew in a great flashing arc at the behest of arms that put toothpicks to shame. At the count of six he straightened up, exhaled, and, carefully placing the shovel behind a syringa bush where it would be available for the spring planting, went into the house.

I mention this because, in a roundabout way, it gives an insight into the dark intricacies of the feminine mind. Hardly had I scuffed the snow from my boots, brewed a milk punch, and curled up before the fire with Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, concealed within it a photomontage of Balinese maidens hulling rice, when my wife entered. Before I could wipe the steam from my bifocals, she had launched into a philippic worthy of Cicero or Senator Dirksen.
…”Goodness, my dear Xanthippe, you look upset,” I said. “Whatever is the matter – or is it only the ravages of time?”

- from Samson Shorn, or the Slave of Love

It’s time I commented on an alarming trend. Not only are we Americans more sedentary and obese than ever, nowadays we even have lazy tongues. You’d think with all the public exercise they get they’d be regular Jack la Langues, but no, they’re slacking off just like the rest of us. And written English is feeling the effect.

I’m talking, of course, about the increasing tendency towards consonant cluster reduction. When some pairs of words are run together quickly, the tongue must be particularly nimble if it is going to articulate the connection properly. Particularly difficult are dentals running into dentals, as in “iced tea”, and sibilants joining sibilants, as in “chef’s salad”. But others are tricky as well.

What most people do in conversational speech is simply to eliminate one consonant. “Iced tea” then sounds like “ice tea”. What I’ve been noticing the past few years, though, is how casually we are altering the written language as well. “Box set” has almost completely replaced “boxed set”. I see “Chef Salad” on every coffeeshop menu. “Whip Cream”. “Can Tuna”. “Broil T-bone Steak”. “Handicap Facilities”. It all looks downright illiterate to me.

There’s nothing that can be done, of course. This is what happens to languages. It only bothers the old folks, mostly, or usage curmudgeons. And me.