Jeff Duntemann's Contrapositive Diary Rotating Header Image

language

Do Italics Demean or Exalt?

I recently stumbled across a weirdness in the culture of writing: People (editors mostly, but some authors) objecting to the use of italics to set off literal text in another language. To them, the practice is othering, which after sniffing around for a bit I found a number of definitions. The Cambridge Dictionary’s definition is this: “The act of treating someone as though they are not part of a group and are different in some way.” There are others. What the definitions have in common is that othering is about people, not words in a language. I would use the word “shunning,” which is specifically about people, to demonstrate their otherness.

There are a lot of different uses of italics: simple emphasis, a term’s first definition, literal thoughts of characters, formal names of books, plays, ships, and so on. With one exception (stay tuned) I rarely use words from other languages unless they are being absorbed into common English usage and are already chin-deep. With a lot of these, the italics could go either way: Do we italicize “bon mot”? How about “fin de siècle”? or “que sera, sera”? I lean toward italics; again, stay tuned.

People who have read Drumlin Circus or The Everything Machine (and if you haven’t, please do!) are aware of the Bitspace Institute, a cult on the drumlins world obsessed with returning to Earth. They other themselves by excluding women, wearing distinctive clothes, living in a ritual-rich, monastic sort of setting—and speaking classical Latin among themselves, especially in front of non-Institute people, to further demonstrate their otherness. Here’s a sample, from The Everything Machine:


With one foot set a few decimeters ahead of the other, McKinnon tipped
his head back slightly and shouted his command in the Tongue: “Ego Alvah
McKinnon, Consul! Regulam ordinis nostri violastis! Arma ponite, exite et
ante me flectite!
” [I am Consul Alvah McKinnon! You have violated the Rule
of our order! Lay down your weapons, come forth, and kneel before me!]


(McKinnon is the senior consul of the Institute. When he speaks a command, Institute men are required to obey.) The use of Latin is a characteristic of the Institute, so across the novel are short exchanges in “The Tongue” as they call it. I put a translation within square brackets after each Latin section. It’s part of the atmosphere surrounding the Institute, and I want it to be noticed. So in a way, it’s another use of italics as emphasis.

In my YA novel Complete Sentences, Eric’s mother speaks some Polish here and there:


Charlene set down her kielbasa. “Mrs. Lund, How do you say ‘Thank you’ in Polish?”

Dziękuję.”


Here, that dziękuję is Polish is obvious from context. This isn’t always the case:


It might be too late. Bialek poked at the lock’s keypad. Szczury! Someone had gotten to it first!


You might guess from context that it’s some kind of expletive, and it is. Here, “szczury” is Polish for “rats”. The singular form is szczur. Now, there’s a problem with some words, especially from Slavic languages: If you’ve never seen them before, they could look like typos or evidence of corruption in the underlying file. The word “tak” in Polish means “yes.” Used alone, some readers might think it’s a misspelling of “tack.”

Another issue is that the same word might exist in two languages and mean very different things. In Tagalog (the language of the Philippines) the word for sister is “ate.” “Taco” in Japanese means “octopus.” “Slut” is Swedish for “the end.” There are lists of more here and here. My position is that italicizing a word from another language will warn the reader not to jump to conclusions. What italicization means is “this is a word in another language.” There is no judgment whatsoever in that caution.

To the contrary. English is famous for absorbing words from other languages into itself, essentially “othering” those words away from their origins and dropping them heedlessly into the English stewpot. In a sense, italicizing a word from another language honors it as a part of a language and a worthy culture that should be respected, and not treated as just another word collection that we can pick and choose from to fatten up our English.

All that said, it’s really not something worth fighting over. From what I read earlier today, the AP Stylebook recently picked it up. No big deal; I learned on and remain a Chicago Manual of Style guy. I just wanted to point out that most arguments of this type can go both or many ways, and there are nuances that should not be conveniently ignored in the cause of self-aggrandizement. I’ll keep writing the way I’ve always written. Others may do what they want. English survived Finnegan’s Wake. It’ll survive the nuanced uses of italics, whatever those turn out to be as the years roll on.

Odd Lots

  • In response to numerous queries: QBit is still alive, and still pretty frisky, considering that our vet suggested he would be gone by now. Yes, his lymph nodes are still swelling, and we won’t have him for a whole lot longer, but he’s fighting lymphoma pretty well. We’re giving him a supplement called Apocaps, that supposedly accelerates apoptosis in cancer cells. I’ll keep you posted.
  • A new study involving more than a million patients pretty much drives the last nail into the coffin of cholesterol alarmism. Cholesterol doesn’t cause heart disease, and therefore statins don’t do people any good. This is a very very big deal. It’s not enough to ignore government-issued nutrition advice. I’d recommend doing the opposite.
  • There are 18 volcanoes in the US considered “very high threats.” I have never lived close to any of them, and that was (mostly) deliberate. Arizona has two volcanoes with a threat rating (one “moderate” and one “very low”) but neither of those is within a hundred miles of me. Click through to the PDF; it’s excellent, and will tell you what volcanoes in your state have threat ratings.
  • Good article on life expectancy. (Thanks to Wes Plouff for the link.) As I read it, the US is doing pretty well compared to the rest of the world. I wish there were data on life expectancy plotted against habitual hours of sleep per night. My intuition is that people who short sleep die younger.
  • 2018’s tornado count is the lowest in 65 years. STORMY, are you still at it?
  • Merriam-Webster will show you what words were coined the year you were born, or any arbitrary year from 1500 to the present. On the list for 1952 are stoned, global warming, deep space, modem, nonjudgmental, softcover, field-effect transistor, plotline, sonic boom, and Veterans Day. So what are the cool words on your list?
  • We don’t hear much about polar bears these days, in part because they’re thriving, in spite of any changes in the climate that may be happening. Three recent papers cited at the link.
  • Our pool water is still at 84 degrees, almost certainly due to a warmish fall (it hit 90 in our neighborhood today) and especially our pool cover. We were in the pool today, and luvvin’ it.
  • Best webcomic I’ve seen in some time. Carol and I just finished a whole box of pumpkin spice K-cups, and that may do us for another year. We think that coffee should be light, sweet, and spicy, like life. Goths we are not, evidently.

Odd Lots

Remembering the Known Unknown, Redux

It happened again. I tried to remember a person (two persons, actually) and remembered several things about them, but not their names. This sounds ordinary enough (especially if you’re a Boomer) but hold on a sec. There’s more.

First, if you’ve never read this entry of mine, it’s might be worth a look. If it’s TL,DR, I’ll summarize: I tried to remember the name of a favorite poet, and failed. However, I did remember that his name was the same as the name of Indiana Jones’ rival in Raiders of the Lost Ark. I couldn’t remember that name either, but I knew it was the same name. After I had gone on to something else for awhile, the name popped up out of nowhere: The poet. The rival.

Clearly, human memory is not a set of SQL tables.

So the other night, I was reading some article online, and it mentioned the hapless Jayne Mansfield in passing, referring to her as a classic “blonde bombshell.” That’s a phrase I hadn’t heard in some time, and after I wondered briefly why there were no brunette bombshells, a peculiar thing occurred to me: There had been two blonde bombshells whose names were odd but very similar, structurally. I remembered that the women themselves were similar, but then again, “blonde bombshell” was a type in its day, and there were many, including Jean Harlow, Marilyn Monroe, and Jayne Mansfield. Ok. I dug deeper, and came up with another weird recall: Their names both had three parts…but no names appeared. Why is it that I could know that two names each had three parts and were structurally similar, without remembering the names themselves?

Two hours later, while I was reading ARs of the mass storage chapter in my Raspberry Pi book, two names surfaced in the back of my head simultaneously:

Mamie Van Doren.

Monique Van Vooren.

There’s nothing remarkable about either of them, and as I am not a fan of blonde bombshells to begin with, I had to wonder why I remembered them at all. Then again, I can sing the entire theme song of Car 54, Where Are You? which hasn’t been first-run since 1963. Memory is a weird business–especially when it stops working effectively.

Back in the entry I cited from 2013, I posited that we could think before we could speak, and so we probably store the names of things separately from their attributes. I still think this is true, but I think it’s even more peculiar that I could remember attributes of two names without remembering the names themselves. The key may be that we use different neural machinery to store names and attributes, so if the attributes of names are to be remembered, they get remembered by the attribute machinery rather than the name machinery.

It makes evolutionary sense: Knowing that the guy in the next cave is short, strong as an ox, has a stone axe buried permanently in his skull, and has a bad temper is a survival skill. It didn’t matter that he didn’t have a name when there were only four caves in the neighborhood. The attribute that needed to be remembered when looking his way was “twitchy badass.” Names probably evolved out of attributes; think “Eric the Red.” But the attributes came first. Names came about when the world grew so complex that passing knowledge among peers through shared experience was no longer enough.

Evolution doesn’t replace. It overlays. So all that weird freaky ancient stuff is still down there somewhere, and is more loosely coupled to the newer stuff than we might like–especially when it’s the newer stuff that starts to malfunction first.

Odd Lots

Odd Lots

Odd Lots

Odd Lots

  • Lenin’s head is missing. It was last seen rolling around a forest near Berlin 23 years ago, but nobody can find it now, even though it weighs three and a half tons. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
  • Evidently Lenin loses his head a lot. Somehow that doesn’t surprise me. Shame it didn’t happen in 1890 or so.
  • How far does $100 go in your state? (Backstory here.) Be careful; the figures are state-wide averages. It’s much worse in urban cores. (Thanks to Tony Kyle for the link.)
  • If you’ve never seen one, here’s an ad-farm article. I’ve often wondered if these are machine generated, written by people who don’t know English well, or machine-obfuscated copies of legitimate articles, intended to duck news providers’ plagiarism bots.
  • Wired volcanologist Eric Klemetti reports that a swarm of small earthquakes may presage an eruption from Iceland’s Barðarbunga volcano. The volcano is interesting because its name contains the ancient letter eth (ð) something I don’t recall seeing on Web news sites in a lot of years. To generate an eth on Windows, by the way, just enter Alt-0240.
  • Wired misses as often as it hits. One of its supposed futurists is telling us that the educated elite should be able to license reproduction, and dictate who can and who cannot have babies. By the way, his description of who is unfit to reproduce sounds a lot like the nonwhite urban poor. Articles of this sort are about as wise as “The Case for Killing Granny,” which put Newsweek in a world of hurt back in 2009.
  • To make you love this guy even more, let me quote a summary of presentation he did on Red Ice Radio: “Zoltan argues that ultimately technology will be helpful to the ‘greater good’ and must be implemented, even if by force and even if there are causalities along the way. In the second hour, Zoltan philosophizes about technology as evolution and luck as the prime mover of the human experience. He talks about maximizing on the transhumanist value for the evolution of our species. We parallel transhumanism with religious thinking. He’ll speak in favor of controversial subjects such as a transhumanist dictatorship, population control, licenses to have children and people needing to justify their existence in front of a committee, much like the Fabian Socialist George Bernard Shaw’s idea.” If I were a transhumanist, I’d be ripping him several new ones right now. Or is transhumanism really that nasty?
  • Nobel laureate physicist Frank Wilczek is not proposing thiotimoline, nor anything else (I think) having to do with time travel. He believes that he’s broken the temporal symmetry of nature…which sounds devilish and full of interesting possibilities. As soon as I figure out what the hell it all means, time crystals will land in one of my hard SF concepts in -5 milliseconds.
  • Michael Covington reminded us on Facebook that there are a surprising number of plurals with no singular form, including kudos, biceps, suds, and shenanigans. (I do wonder, as does Bill Lindley, if the very last bubble in the sink is a sud.)
  • That discussion in turn reminded me of a concept for an END piece in PC Techniques that I took notes on but never wrote: the KUDOS operating system, which lacks error messages but pays you a compliment every time you do anything right. In 1992 I was thinking of purely textual compliments, but these days I imagine a spell-checker that plays “Bravo!” on the speakers every time you spell a word correctly. Wouldn’t that be fun?

Odd Lots

Odd Lots