So, there’s a post about how Bertie Wooster’s “what ho!” is a corruption of Beowulf’s “Hwaet!” And @fremedon and @oldshrewsburyian wrote up some things I decided to voice.
We hear from people a lot who are enthusiastic about linguistics, and many of you have been trying to get other people in your life also into linguistics, which is amazing!
Whether it’s linguistics fans trying to articulate their (our) excitement to family and friends, linguistics academics trying to spread the word to future students who might want to take a linguistics course, or when we go to in-person conferences and events and we’re trying to explain why people might want to listen to a whole half hour of linguistics enthusiasm every month, we’ve been feeling a need for more ways to bring that linguistics energy from the internet into the physical world.
Also, it turns out coincidentally that Gretchen’s and Lauren’s and producer Claire’s and editor Leah’s friends have all separately been getting really into zines lately [although a few of our friends would like it pointed out that they’ve been into zines since earlier zine waves. you’re very cool and we appreciate you.]
Basically, we make some zine designs, we release them as pdfs under Creative Commons licenses for anyone to print off from lingthusiasm.com/zines for free, and then people can have them floating around on your coffeetable, bulletinboard, break room table, outreach events, wherever you’re looking for eye-catching pick-up-able objects to help get people interested in linguistics. And then we can print them off and bring them to whatever events we happen to be at too!
All the zines are made to be printed off from a single sheet of paper which is cut and folded in minizine style to keep photocopying costs low. We’re making all the designs available in both US letter and A4, and with colour/black and white options, so they can work for as many people as possible!
Zines are DIY and participatory, so we’re also hoping to encourage other people to make linguistics-related zines and help people find other linguistics zines that exist!
We’ve done one lingcomm through zines workshop at a linguistics conference so far (LabPhon), and have another lined up (NWAV), and we’ve heard from some linguistics profs who are excited by the idea of using zines in teaching as well! You can see (and repurpose) Linguistics Communication through Zines slides here.
Let us know by tagging @lingthusiasm on social media if you make a linguistics-related zine or use zines for any other fun purpose!
Okay, we’ve made you wait long enough. Wanna see some zines?
Here are two shapes. If you had to assign the name “bouba” to one of them and “kiki” to the other, which name would you give to which? If you think about it, you probably have a guess… In this Lingthusiasm zine, Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about these two linguistically famous shapes. Read the whole zine and get printable versions here!
Why does “ie” turn “dog” into itty bitty “doggie”? In this Lingthusiasm zine, Leah Velleman gets enthusiastic about diminutives. Yes, this one is extra tiny, it’s a diminutive zine about diminutives! A zinelet? Or zineling? Read the whole zine and get printable versions here!
Stay tuned for more Lingthusiasm zines in the future! And thank you to all our members on Patreon who got to see the zines early and gave us many helpful comments! It’s thanks to the support of our community that we’re able to make fun free linguistics resources like this.
Stay Lingthusiastic!
Honestly, people’s incredibly excited responses to the zines so far are exactly why we’ve started making zines that are enthusiastic about linguistics to go with the podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics, so perhaps it needed no explaining, but hey, we had this meta post already half-drafted so perhaps you’d like to see some reasoning about why we’re getting into zines at the moment.
Why does “ie” turn “dog” into itty bitty “doggie”? In this Lingthusiasm zine, Leah Velleman gets enthusiastic about diminutives. Yes, this one is extra tiny, it’s a diminutive zine about diminutives! A zinelet? Or zineling?
How to cut and fold a minizine (for this extra special tinyzine, cut the paper into quarters first along the dotted lines, then fold and cut four tinyzines like a usual minizine)
(She’s right, we fudged a little! The -ie in “doggie” only works on some words in English. It would be cool to have a version that worked on every noun, like some languages have. Alternatively: be the change you want to see in the English language?)
So “currying” a furry animal means grooming or brushing it with a currycomb, which in turn comes from the Old French correier meaning “to prepare [something]”, because you prepare a horse for riding by brushing it; it’s most commonly applied to horses but you can get e.g. currycombs for dogs.
If I understand correctly, medieval French folk tales considered chestnut-colored horses to be deceitful and tricky; the Old French word for a chestnut or dun horse was fauvel, and so the Old French expression correier fauvel, literally “to brush the chestnut horse”, meant lying or being hypocritical for personal gain. This turned into “curry favel” in 15th-century English, and then mutated into “curry favor” over the next few centuries as people forgot about the horse.
So “currying favor” is really “brushing the Horse of Lies”, and the reason you can’t curry goodwill, or love, or hatred, or even disfavor is that we didn’t have Horses for those.
And it follows that we can gain the ability to curry other things by assigning them to Horses.
I realize, looking back on this post, that regular readers of my blog may have thought I made this up. Making up a ridiculous etymology is certainly the sort of thing I might do; in fact I’ve been meaning to start a sideblog dedicated solely to sufficiently accurate etymologies, and have a notebook with dozens of them jotted down, I just haven’t had the time to do anything with them.
But I want to stress that this is not one of those cases. This is, to the best of my knowledge, the very real etymology of the phrase “curry favor”.
The Old French fauve or falve referred to the light-brown color that’s sometimes called “fallow” in modern English, but since it also sounded similar to faux, meaning “false”, it was also associated with deceit and trickery ; the idiom estriller Fauvel literally meant “to groom the fallow one” but idiomatically meant “to lie or trick people”.
Then in the 1300s we get the French poem Roman de Fauvel, a satirical poem about a fauve horse, whose name is derived both from the color and from the fact that FAVVEL is an acronym of Flaterie, Avarice, Vilanie, Varieté, Envie, Lascheté (Flattery, Greed, Vileness, Fickleness, Envy, and Cowardice) - all the different vices that this horse embodies.
Fauvel (purportedly modeled after Enguerrand de Marigny [source], an advisor to King Philip IV) is a sinful, conniving, and very rich horse who has various religious and secular leaders fawning over him and brushing him; it was well-known enough that “grooming Fauvel” came to mean “sucking up to someone powerful” more than just “being evil”, and when it was translated into English the grooming was translated as currying, which specifically is grooming a horse with a curry comb [wiktionary]. From this we got the Middle English expression “currying Fauvel”, which then mutated via folk etymology (in the “reinterpretation of unfamiliar words as more familiar ones” sense, not the “people are wrong about etymology” sense) into “currying favor”.
The same gesture can mean different things, or have different names in different languages. In this Lingthusiasm zine, Lauren Gawne gets enthusiastic about these “emblem gestures."
Which shape is bouba and which is kiki? A Lingthusiasm zine
Here are two shapes. If you had to assign the name “bouba” to one of them and “kiki” to the other, which name would you give to which? If you think about it, you probably have a guess… In this Lingthusiasm zine, Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about these two linguistically famous shapes.
118: Using tech to chat with bonobos, dogs, and whales
Can we teach dogs to express their needs better by pressing buttons? What about the studies trying to teach bonobos and other primates to communicate through buttons or signs? What have we learned about whale communication from the first-ever recording of a sperm whale birth?
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about how people use technology to try and enhance our communications with bonobos, dogs, and sperm whales. (Sorry, other animals, you’ll need to wait for a future episode.) We talk about the crucial distinction in animal communication studies between “any communication at all” (yes) and “language the way humans do it” (no), how we can actually learn more by appreciating animal communication systems on their own terms, and how some kinds of tech are helping us do that. We also talk about the logistics of studying animal communication, including avoiding the Clever Hans effect, how ubiquitous recording technology has changed the game on whalesong in recent decades (but there’s still lots of catching up to do), and an at-home study of over 10,000 dogs using buttons (they’re still recruiting if you want to join!).
In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about some of our favourite deleted bits from recent interviews that we didn’t quite have space to share with you! First, an excerpt from our interview with Danny Bate, host of the podcast A Language I Love Is… about a language he loves: Czech! We talk about learning languages through in-laws, stock phrases, and hidden etymological parallels. Second, more from Claire Bowern about the mysterious Voynich Manuscript, including a peek inside her super multidisciplinary class on the topic, and the story of World War II codebreakers who worked on the manuscript in between solving lightning-fast crossword puzzles and the Enigma Machine.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).
At long last we have produced an episode to send to your overly credulous friend who thinks the button dogs on instagram are actually making jokes rather than being cleverly edited. (Also stay for how incredibly little we know about whale communication, no really, less than that, but we’re learning more all the time!)
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