Friday’s Zits returns to some old themes for the strip:

The theme is that women — especially, teenaged girls — talk talk talk, in a rapid, never-ending stream, one sentence flowing into the next, one story into the next, without pause. You can’t get a word in edgewise, the saying goes. (The truth is far from this, of course.)

But Jeremy has found the solution, a very satisfying one: the punctuational kiss.

More adventures on the comics pages, this time in Nicole Hollander’s Sylvia, from the 2010 retrospective on 30 years of the strip, The Sylvia Chronicles: 30 Years of Graphic Misbehavior from Reagan to Obama (with pointed commentary by Hollander on the already pointed cartoons).

From Jules Feiffer’s foreward:

For thirty years, long before Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert, my friend Nicole Hollander has been one of our nations’s leading satirists. Than mean that she is in the business of telling the truth and making it funny. She is right about almost anything. And because she is right, and she is funny, she has no power whatsoever.

From Wikipedia:

Sylvia is a long-running comic strip by American cartoonist Nicole Hollander [born in 1939] that offers commentary on political, social and cultural topics, and on cats, primarily in the voice of its title character, Sylvia [Lake]. Distributed to newspapers nationally by Tribune Media Services, Sylvia also appears online at Hollander’s blog, Bad Girl Chats. On March 26, 2012, Hollander announced “Sylvia’s retirement from the newspaper business.”

(The circulation of the strip had been steadily declining, as fewer and fewer papers carried it; the Chicago Tribune dropped it in 2010.)

The strip shows Sylvia talking: to her mother, to her daughter Rita, to female friends, to her friend Harry at his bar. She talks across the table, shouts to the next room from a bubble bath, and chats on the phone (a lot).

Hollander’s formative influences include her mother, as in this vignette (where she engages in a bit of creative inflectional morphology, with a feminist bite):

And her inventions sometimes take her out of the circle of family and friends, as here, in colloquy with a visiting alien in 1980, which moves to gender and sexuality:

A sampling of language-related strips, starting with one  from 3/28/83 on animal communication (cats figure prominently in Sylvia’s life, but she’s no fool):

Then a snowclone from Hollander, explaining a cartoon of 8/31/84:

This takes some explanation. The analogical snowclone — X is the Y of Z — is the easy part; see Ben Zimmer’s Language Log pieces on the figure (“The Rosa Parks of blogs”, here, and “X is the Y of Z: pop music edition”, here). Then there’s political hostess Georgette Mosbacher; from Wikipedia:

Georgette Mosbacher (née Paulsin; born January 16, 1947…) is the CEO of Borghese, a cosmetics manufacturer based in New York City, and a fundraiser for the United States Republican Party. In 1987, she purchased the high-end cosmetics firm La Prairie, served as its CEO, and sold it in 1991 to Beiersdorf. She served as national co-chairman of John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign and is co-chair of the Republican National Committee’s Finance Committee.

She’s still at it. From a Jason Horowitz story in the Washington Post on 9/19/12 about the “cosmetics impresario and eccentric grande dame of GOP fundraising” at the Republican National Convention:

The 65-year-old businesswoman, chief executive officer of Borghese cosmetics, has never shied away from talking about how her marriages to real estate developer Robert Muir, the late Faberge CEO George Barrie and Bush family friend and former commerce secretary Robert Mosbacher catapulted her into a world of wealth, soirees and presidential politics. Yet, despite the attention paid to the marriages and divorces of “Hurricane Georgette” or “Monsoon Mosbacher” (as she has been called by columnists), her most enduring and overlooked relationship has been with Lyn Paulsin — sister, manager, employee, confidante, emissary, Girl Friday, …

… Georgette is renowned for political fundraisers and society bashes at her Fifth Avenue apartment, which is adorned with crystal chandeliers, faux-Roman marble busts and gilded mirrors. Another constant feature is Lyn, who has dated regulars in the Mosbacher party circuit. The gossip pages mistakenly linked her to Republican consultant Ed Rollins; she says she did go on a couple of dates with Rush Limbaugh.

The snowclone analogy is to a hostess of 60+ years ago, Perle Mesta:

Perle Reid Mesta (nee Skirvin) (October 12, 1889 – March 16, 1975) was an American socialite, political hostess, and U.S. Ambassador to Luxembourg (1949–1953).

Mesta was known as the “hostess with the mostest [sic]” for her lavish parties featuring the brightest stars of Washington, D.C., society, including artists, entertainers and many top-level national political figures. [she was born Pearl and changed the spelling to Perle; Hollander's comment uses the Pearl version]

… She was the inspiration for Irving Berlin’s musical Call Me Madam, which starred Ethel Merman as the character based on Mesta in both the Broadway play and the movie.

Next up in Sylvia, some portmanteau play on 1/21/91:

Start with catalytic converter, analyze the first word as cat + alytic, and then replace cat by a cow, to get a substitution portmanteau.

Next, and possibly my favorite in this set, is a strip (from 2/23/95) with an arresting word choice:

I hesitate to speculate about the workings of Newt Gingrich’s mind, but it strikes me that he was aiming for a word like disorder or disease and chose the more specific infection as a label for the larger category. Of course, Gingrich is mistaken in viewing menstruation as a kind of disease, but this misapprehension has a very long history (involving, for example, menstruating women treated as “unclean”, in much the same way as diseased people).

Finally, from 2/2/99, a piece of playful morphology:

The basis for the sarcastic poetness in her poetness is highness in the deferential formula her highness (possessive pronoun + abstract N, as in his eminence, your worship, your grace). On the playful extension of the derivational suffix -ness (which normally combines with Adj to yield abstract N, as in happiness) to all sorts of other contexts, most commonly to combination with Nbase to yield abstract N, often with the sense ‘essence of Nbase’ (mathness, schoolness, paperness), see my posting on playful morphology in Get Fuzzy. But Hollander’s poetness has a different pattern.

This morning’s Zits, in which Jeremy responds to his mother’s call for help:

Note the facial gestures, and the subversion of the mother’s request, in which Jeremy does not in fact take out the garbage, but does what strikes him as less work — though it makes a major mess.

In humor of all kinds, including comedy movies as well as comic strips, men are stereotyically given to “fixing” things in creative ways, either to avoid work they don’t want to do or to show off their supposed competence in some culturally male domain. In the second class, we have Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau in the movie The Pink Panther (1963) (warning: the clip is very loud at the beginning; adjust your sound):

This clip also shows Clouseau’s remarkable phonetics (everybody’s vowels vary a good bit, even in this short clip) and a little bit of non-native syntax.

A recurrent theme in the cartoon Zits is the replication of gender stereotypes saying that girls are chatty, boys are laconic. Postings on the subject (using Zits in particular) go back at least as far as Mark Liberman’s Language Log posting of 4/26/05 (“Language and gender: The cartoon version”); meanwhile, Mark has been attacking the stereotypes directly with data. But Zits rolls on; here’s today’s strip:

A dense block of wordage is a Zits convention for indicating overwhelming amounts of speech.

Today’s Zippy takes on differences between the sexes (at least in Dingburg):

Women affiliative, men competitive. (On telling the men from the women: the women wear earrings, the men do not.)

An assortment of names: Imelda as in Imelda Marcos; Izelda possibly a play on that, or an allusion to iZelda (an iPhone version of the game Zelda); Litvak ‘Lithuanian Jew’; beefeater ‘guard at the Tower of London’ (or Beefeater gin).

Today’s Zits:

The stereotype is that women (especially girls) gossip about other people and their lives, but men (and boys) talk about weightier and more objective things, like politics and sports. Studies of talk among men in groups, as in college fraternities, don’t fully support the stereotype (google {gossip gender differences}: at least in some studies, women in groups do spend more time gossiping than men in groups, but men in groups gossip quite a lot.

Wikipedia on gossip:

Gossip is idle talk or rumor about the personal or private affairs of others. It is one of the oldest and most common means of sharing facts, views and slander. This term is used pejoratively by its reputation for the introduction of errors and variations into the information transmitted, and it also describes idle chat, a rumor of personal, or trivial nature.

Gossip has been researched in terms of its evolutionary psychology origins. This has found gossip to be an important means by which people can monitor cooperative reputations and so maintain widespread indirect reciprocity. Indirect reciprocity is defined here as “I help you and somebody else helps me.” Gossip has also been identified by Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary biologist, as aiding social bonding in large groups. With the advent of the internet gossip is now widespread on an instant basis, from one place in the world to another what used to take a long time to filter through is now instant.

The term is sometimes used to specifically refer to the spreading of dirt and misinformation, as (for example) through excited discussion of scandals. Some newspapers carry “gossip columns” which detail the social and personal lives of celebrities or of élite members of certain communities.

Today’s Zits, with Jeremy communicating with his fingers but not with his voice, to his mother’s dismay:

This could be about teenagers and their parents, or about the fabled laconic nature of boys (and men), or of course about both.

Today’s Zits, once again on male/female differences:

The teenage predecessor to cartoon and sitcom husbands who don’t listen at all to what their wives are saying.

From Kim Darnell on Facebook, a story from a year ago (4/17/12) about the adoption of a gender-neutral pronoun in Swedish, with this handsome accompanying graphic:

  (#1)

The graphic has three interlinked components: The “female symbol” (or “mirror of Venus”), a circle (representing a body) with a cross below it (♀ in biological literature); the “male symbol” (or “spear of Mars”), a circle with an arrow at the upper right (♂ in biological literature); and a plain circle in the center, representing a body unspecified as to sex. Turning to grammatical gender rather than biological sex, the mirror of Venus represents feminine gender (as in the Swedish pronoun hon ‘she’), the spear of Mars the masculine gender (as in the Swedish pronoun han ‘he), and the plain circle the new gender-neutral 3sg Swedish pronoun hen).

A complexity here is that this symbol is sometimes taken to be a transgender symbol, the central circle represeting someone who in some sense is *both* female and male. And for this purpose there are a number of competing symbols.

The move towards hen was noted briefly in Language Log last year, where Geoff Pullum observed that it dates back to the mid 1960s. Geoff was reporting on a Slate article lambasting this move — an article confounding grammatical gender with (reference to) biological sex (which is now commonly referred to as gender, as in gender equality).

Let’s move now to biological sex in human beings. Opposite-sex coupling is represented symbolically by linked ♀ and ♂, sometimes with both symbols in the same color, most commonly black, but often with the sexes color-coded, most often with pink (or red) for Venus and blue for Mars, though other choices occur: there are somewhat queered versions with Venus in magenta and Mars in purple, and then there’s this oddity (from journalism students at Coventry University) in neon green and yellow:

  (#2)

Then there are same-sex couplings, commonly represented by linked Venuses or Marses aligned in the same direction. Again, most commonly in black, but sometimes with the Venuses in pink and the Marses in blue. Or there’s the possibility of distinguishing the two partners in a same-sex linking by color, as here (with purple and pink):

  (#3)

This at least *looks* like the imposition of opposite-sex differences on those in a same-sex pairing, with one of the couple as “the woman” and the other as “the man”. A similar imposition occurs when a same-sex pairing is represented with one of the symbols significantly smaller than the other.

On to trans (for transgender) people, for whom there is one body (so only one circle in the symbol) but in some sense two sexes — most commonly, the birth sex and the sex of self-image, which moves many such people to transition from the birth sex to the sex appropriate to the self-image. There are two straightforward ways of representing this situation, both simple combinations of Venus and Mars: combining the auxiliary portions of Venus annd Mars into a compound:

  (#4)

or using both auxiliary portions, in their usual places (in this case, with color coding as well):

  (#5)

Somewhat remarkably, what seems to have become the trans symbol of choice uses both of these schemes at once (here, with color coding for all three of the auxiliary portions — pink, blue, and purple):

  (#6)

Here’s a variant with no color coding, but with the trans symbol within a pink (gay / queer) triangle:

  (#7)

On a postcard (with a pile of images of and information about the state of Maryland) from Chris Ambidge on Saturday, the news that the state motto is

Manly Deeds, Womanly Words

Sigh: men act, women talk. At least in Maryland.

Side note: the Pinhead town of Dingburg is in Maryland.

On the heels of my little note on “Manly Deeds, Womanly Words” (a comment from John Baker notes that this is “the motto of the Calvert family “Fatti maschii parole femine” loosely translated [from Italian] as “Manly deeds, womanly words” ”) came two more items on male/female differences: a piece in the NYT Sunday Review on the 21st (“The Tangle of the Sexes” by Bobbi Carothers and Harry Reis); and an Alex cartoon in the London Telegraph on men as rational, women as emotional.

Carothers and Reis take up a topic that Mark Liberman has been posting about on Language Log, repeatedly, for years:

Men and women are so different they might as well be from separate planets, so says the theory of the sexes famously explicated in John Gray’s 1992 best seller, “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus.”

That men and women differ in certain respects is unassailable. Unfortunately, the continuing belief in “categorical differences” — men are aggressive, women are caring — reinforces traditional stereotypes by treating certain behaviors as immutable. And, it turns out, this belief is based on a scientifically indefensible model of human behavior.

As the psychologist Cordelia Fine explains in her [2010] book “Delusions of Gender,” [subtitled “How our minds, society, and neurosexism create difference”] the influence of one kind of categorical thinking, neurosexism — justifying differential treatment by citing differences in neural anatomy or function — spills over to educational and employment disparities, family relations and arguments about same-sex institutions.

Before I quote from Carothers & Rice on their research, let me recommend Fine’s book and appreciate her coinage neurosexism. (And also recommend Lise Eliot’s 2010 Pink Brain, Blue Brain (subtitled “How small differences grow into troublesome gaps — and what we can do about it”).) Now back to C&R:

The alternative [to categorical thinking], a dimensional perspective, ascribes behavior to individuals, as one of their various personal qualities. It is [then] much easier to imagine how change might take place.

But what of all those published studies, many of which claim to find differences between the sexes? In our research, published recently in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, we shed an empirical light on this question by using a method called taxometric analysis.

This method asks whether data from two groups are likely to be taxonic — a classification that distinguishes one group from another in a nonarbitrary, fundamental manner, called a “taxon” — or whether they are more likely to be dimensional, with individuals’ scores dispersed along a single continuum.

… Across analyses spanning 122 attributes from more than 13,000 individuals, one conclusion stood out: instead of dividing into two groups, men and women overlapped considerably on attributes like the frequency of science-related activities, interest in casual sex, or the allure of a potential mate’s virginity.

Even stereotypical traits, like assertiveness or valuing close friendships, fell along a continuum. In other words, we found little or no evidence of categorical distinctions based on sex.

… Just to be safe, we repeated our analyses on several dimensions where we did expect categorical differences: physical size, athletic ability and sex-stereotyped hobbies like playing video games and scrapbooking. On these we did find evidence for categories based on sex.

(Note that even for “taxonic” distinctions, there is likely to be some overlap; the taxa will not necessarily be mutually exclusive. The question is the degree and nature of the overlap.)

Then to the Alex cartoon, sent to me by John Baker yesterday:

(Click on the image to embiggen it.)

The Alex strip was new to me. Baker explained in e-mail that

it runs weekdays in the London Telegraph and is, as far as I know, the only comic strip whose protagonist is an investment banker. The characters in this particular strip have not been seen before, except for the woman, who is Alex’s wife, Penny. This strip is typical of Alex in that it sets up an expectation (in this case, that women are the subjective and emotional sex), then subverts it in the final panel.

On the strip, from Wikipedia:

Alex is a British cartoon strip by Charles Peattie and Russell Taylor. It first appeared in the short-lived London Daily News in 1987. It moved to The Independent later that year and then to the Daily Telegraph in 1992.

… The humour in the strip derives from wordplay and twist endings related to Alex’s world of yuppie values, right-wing politics, obsession with appearances, displays of wealth and schemes to stay one up in the world of international finance.

Peattie and Taylor are reputed to work closely with a variety of London financial contacts to ensure that their strips accurately reflect the recent scandals and rumours which pass around the City. Much gossip has circulated as to the likely inspiration for some of the characters.

… The most common kind of joke features a conversation between the characters, where in the final frame a twist ending becomes apparent – the context of the conversation was not what the reader had supposed, usually reflecting on the protagonists’ materialistic values and priorities.

… Another kind of strip which appears occasionally consists of only two large frames, showing two different characters, or the same character in two different situations, giving a monologue composed of almost exactly the same words, but which, in the different situations, have very different meanings.

Summing up: action vs. talk; assertiveness vs. affiliation (related to competition vs. collaboration) and other putatively gender-related attributes; and rational objectivity vs. emotional subjectivity. All dubious dichotomies.

… in today’s Zits:

This is a topic that Scott and Borgman (somewhat wearisomely) just can’t leave alone. I do like the economical communication of Jeremy’s nonplussed state of mind, though.

Today’s Zippy:

So the strip is “about” hair(s), but it’s also “about” How ’bout them Cubbies?

(On a personal hair and holiday note: I’m watching Hairspray for Mothers Day.)

1. Speech acts. Let’s start with How about those Cubs? — illustrating an idiomatic construction in which a sentence in the form of an information question (in how about) functions as mild exclamation about the focus of the sentence (the Chicago Cubs baseball team) and an invitation to the addressee to talk about that focus. This a conventionalization of a specific question form for a specific speech act — something that you have to learn if you are to be competent as a speaker of vernacular American English.

2. Background knowledge. If you don’t know about the Cubbies, then the question will misfire. Apparently Zippy (“Are they imaginary?”) and San Bruno (“I don’t care for synchronized diving”) don’t get it.

3. Social context. Things are more complicated than that, since the question is usually addressed by men to men, typically in an attempt to initiate a conversation between guys who are not socially close. Neither of these clauses is a rigid condition on use, but follow from the social fact that sports talk is stereotypically a “masculine” province and so can serve as neutral social grease for men without much shared experience.

4. Cubbies. Then there’s the affectionate diminutive for Cubs – conveying an emotional attachment to the team.

5. ’bout. And the casual-speech reduction of about to ’bout — further marking the sentence as informal, vernacular.

6. Demonstrative them. But the big point — note Glutina’s “I don’t think that’s grammatical” — is demonstrative them in them Cubbies (instead of those Cubbies). This is a very widespread non-standardism.

MWDEU has a nice entry on demonstrative them (pp. 897-8), though it doesn’t solve the puzzle of the form’s source. It’s attested since the end of the 16th century and is pretty clearly not a continuation of the Old English definite article.

It went largely unnoticed for about a century, and then began appearing in literary texts in the 19th century, but almost entirely in representations of speech. By the middle of the 19th century, it was regularly criticized in schoolbooks as a barbarism. Then:

Perhaps because of the efforts of two centuries worth of schoolmasters, the demonstrative them is now largely restricted to the speech of the uneducated and the familiar speech of others. It has been in use for four centuries, and has still not reached respectability.

But where does it come from?

A number of syntacticians have pointed out that for 1st and 2nd persons, the pl personal pronouns are used as demonstrative determiners: we linguists, (vernacular) us linguists, you linguists, (dialectal) youse linguists. Then, on the model of the vernacular us linguists, we get vernacular  them linguists.

Then, given the vernacular and informal features of how about questions, it’s natural to use them as a demonstrative in them. How (a)bout those Cub(bie)s?  isn’t infelicitous, but it’s on the stiff side; them is more colloquial.

Today’s Dilbert:

Alice gives a witheringly sarcastic response to the pointy-headed boss, supplying a definition of collaborate that unpacks some of the connotations of the word for her. The boss then puts her down by maintaining that she is uncooperative (she ought to “play well with others” by collaborating with Larry), and she counters by pulling out the gender assumptions in the boss’s observation (women are supposed to be cooperative and collaborative, men are supposed to be assertive and confident).

Item 1, royal names. On NPR’s Morning Edition this morning, people discussing names for the forthcoming British royal baby.

Item 2, unisex names, in particular Taylor.

Item 3, fashions in naming, especially for American Jews.

Royal names. The summary of the Morning Edition story:

The imminent arrival of the future heir to the British throne is spawning gambling, baby products and guessing over names. There’s been no official announcement about when the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s baby is due. It’s believed to be Saturday, and the kingdom is prepared.

In the discussion, several candidate names were offered; some (Charlotte, Alexandra, Victoria, Elizabeth, Catherine) were judged to be suitably royal names, while others (like Sandra and Sharon) were characterized as non-U or, in the words of one interviewee, “common” — meaning not ‘frequent’ or ‘popular’ (Elizabeth and Catherine are very frequent British personal names, after all), but as NOAD2 puts it, ‘showing a lack of taste and refinement; vulgar’.

Extended discussion in a 7/5 CNN piece, “Queen Ella? King Terry? What’s in a royal name?” by Bryony Jones:

Way back in the mists of time, when schoolkids were expected to learn seemingly endless lists of facts off by heart, they chanted a poem to remember the names of England’s kings and queens.

“Willie, Willie, Harry, Ste,” it began. “Harry, Dick, John, Harry three / One, two, three Neds, Richard two / Harrys four, five, six, then who?” It then ended with the most recent monarchs: “Edward seven, George and Ted / George the sixth, now Liz instead.” [Willie is William, Harry is Henry, Ste is Stephen, Dick is Richard, Ned and Ted are Edward, and Liz is Elizabeth]

Of course, it’s not done that way any more, but if it were, which name would make it into the next verse? We know that “Charles” and “William” will follow “Liz,” but which name will follow theirs?

… Currently sitting at the top of the list for a girl is Alexandra, with bookmakers offering odds of 7/2 or 4/1 in favor of the new baby being named after the wife of King Edward VII, Queen Elizabeth II’s grandmother.

… In recent years, there has been a move away from classic “regal” names by those on lower branches of the royal family tree.

Prince Andrew and his now ex-wife Sarah “Fergie” Ferguson plumped for the unusual Beatrice and Eugenie for Prince William’s cousins. Princess Anne, William’s aunt, has two granddaughters by son Peter and Canadian daughter-in-law Autumn Phillips: Savannah (born in 2010) and Isla (born in 2012).

But [Claudia] Joseph said William and Kate were unlikely to go for more “trendy” options such as Lily, Ella or Ruby, which are a regular feature in annual lists of the most popular baby names. [They are indeed popular, but in the sense of belonging to the people; they are, however, class-marked as non-U, hence not regal.]

“Obviously other members of the royal family have broken with tradition but the offspring of William and Kate will be a future monarch,” she said.

That means, says [Kate] Williams, “we’re not going to see a Chardonnay, or a Plum, or an Apple.” [Or, of course, a Hashtag, which has been suggested.]

Unisex names. The background story: Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky and I were chatting aimlessly at breakfast last Saturday  when she mentioned that she’d been looking at job applications, including a fair number from Chinese candidates. In most of these cases, their Chinese names gave no clue as to their sex (Elizabeth checked with her Chinese co-workers), but, not to worry, Chinese in the U.S. almost always adopt “English names”, from which sex can be predicted. But in one case, the applicant had chosen the name Taylor. Unfortunately, Taylor is a unisex name.

I cited the (female) singer Taylor Swift, adding that she and (male) actor/model Taylor Lautner had once dated. Elizabeth stared at me in wonderment; how on earth did I (not known to be a follower of Swift’s) come to know such a thing? Well, from Lautner’s Wikipedia page:

In 2009, Lautner was linked romantically to American country pop singer Taylor Swift and American actress and pop singer Selena Gomez.

And why was I reading Lautner’s Wikipedia page? Well, it was research for my “Lycanthropic shirtlessness” posting about him. You pick up all sorts of stuff by accident.

On unisex names, from Wikipedia:

A unisex name (also known as an epicene name or gender-neutral name) is a given name that can be used by a person regardless of the person’s sex. Some countries have laws preventing unisex names, requiring parents to give their children sex-specific names. In other countries unisex names are sometimes avoided for social reasons.

Names may vary their sexual connotation from country to country or language to language. For example, the Italian male name Andrea (derived from Greek Andreas) is understood as a female name in many languages, such as German, Hungarian, Czech, and Spanish. Sometimes parents may choose to name their child in honor of a person of another sex, which – if done widely – can result in the name becoming unisex. For example, Christians, particularly Catholics, may name their sons Marie or Maria in honor of the Virgin Mary or their daughter José in honor of Saint Joseph or Jean in honor of John the Baptist. This religious tradition is more commonly seen in Latin America and Europe than in North America.

Taylor is a family name converted to a personal name; a number of such names have become unisex (usually by starting out as male names). Tyler, for instance, is now occasionally used for women:

His boss was a young woman named Tyler, whom he knew casually in high school. They began dating. (link)

04-10-2012: What better way to celebrate an 0-3 start to the Red Sox season than for the new GM, Ben Cherington, to marry his girlfriend Tyler Tumminia. (link)

Similarly, Ryan:

We know a woman named Ryan but she is 31 years old. Her family just went for it. She’s really nice. I love the name Ryan, but for a boy. (link)

Meanwhile, Jordan, like Taylor, is now pretty frequent as a woman’s name:

Crossing Jordan is an American television crime/drama series that aired on NBC from September 24, 2001 to May 16, 2007. It stars Jill Hennessy as Jordan Cavanaugh, M.D., a crime-solving forensic pathologist employed in the Massachusetts Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. (link)

@Walmart A young woman named Jordan handled the situation perfectly. (link)

And there are other occasional conversions from exclusively male to occasionally female, for instance Justin:

So my name is Justin Danielle Chapman. And I’m a 25 year old mother of two boys, Henry McRae and Beckett Charles. As you can see my name is extremely manly and I want to change it. Since I was a little girl I’ve not liked it. (link)

I was looking for a relaxing massage and he set up an appointment with a nice woman named Justin.  My friend was set up with a woman named Devon. (link)

(Devon is a bonus find.)

Fashions in names. Personal names are famously variable from place to place, time to time, and social group to social group; there’s a considerable literature on the subject.

From the deaths in the NYT on the 10th (p. A22), a moving testament to Sidney Joshua Holand and a life that started in Poland, then went through Siberia and Israel and on to the United States. His survivors: daughters Sharon and Adina (both with good Hebrew-derived names), son-in-law Jeff, and five grandchildren:

Evan, Nicole, Zachary, Justin, and Tyler

(Four boys and a girl, though Evan, like Justin and Tyler — see above — is sometimes used as a girl’s name.) Currently fashionable names, only one (Zachary) of Hebrew origin (though it doesn’t connote Yiddishkeit). As for Justin and Tyler: Justin, Jordan, and Jason are all very popular names for young people these days (all three are names of — male — servers at restaurants I frequent, alas), and they are easily confused, as are the popular Tyler and Taylor.

Sometimes the social associations of personal names shift in surprising ways. Some decades ago there was a fashion in the U.S. for Jews to give their sons Celtic names, so that eventually it became likely that a young American man named Sean or Kevin was Jewish.

I’ll start with a three-strip series from One Big Happy:

(#1)

(#2)

(#3)

The two features at issue here — the discourse particle like and “uptalk” (a high rising intonation at the end of declaratives) — have been much discussed in the linguistic literature. The popular, but inaccurate, perception is that both are characteristic of young people, especially teenagers, especially girls, and both features are the object of much popular complaint.

(Hat tip to Bonnie and Ed Campbell.)

Then, from Sim Aberson, links to two stories from radio station WLRN in Miami, in a series on the accents of Miami: “Miami Accents: How ‘Miamah’ Turned Into A Different Sort Of Twang” by Gabriella Watts (August 26th) and “Miami Accents: Why Locals Embrace That Heavy “L” Or Not” by Patience Haggin (August 27th). The first of these focuses on features of Spanish that have spread in Miami, after 50 years of waves of Spanish-speaking immigrants to the area. The second focuses on features that contribute to outsiders’ impressions that Miami speech sounds both foreign and feminine — concluding that

In addition to the pronunciation features that pervade their speech, Miamians tend to pepper their sentences with “likes” and end them in “upspeak,” making statements sound like questions. These features can make speakers seem unconfident and overly cute — in short, unprofessional.

(and thus calling for accent-reduction coaching).

The first has a YouTube video with an exaggerated performance of Miami-speak (by a young woman, of course) and then an inventory of “non-native features in Miami English”:

First, vowel pronunciation. In Spanish, there are five vowel sounds. In English, there are eleven. Thus, you have words like “hand,” with the long, nasal “A” sound, pronounced more like hahnd because the long “A” does not exist in Spanish.

While most consonants sound the same in Spanish and English, the Spanish “L” is heavier, with the tongue sticking to the roof of the mouth more so than in English. This Spanish “L” pronunciation is present in Miami English.

The rhythms of the two languages are also different. In Spanish, each syllable is the same length, but in English, the syllables fluctuate in length. This is a difference in milliseconds, but they cause the rhythm of Miami English to sound a bit like the rhythm of Spanish.

Finally, “calques” are phrases directly translated from one language to another where the translation isn’t exactly idiomatic in the other language. For example, instead of saying, “let’s get out of the car,” someone from Miami might say, “let’s get down from the car” because of the Spanish phrase bajar del coche.

Now, on that “heavy L” — a piece of lay terminology that was unfamiliar to me. Spanish /l/ differs in two ways from Standard American English /l/: (1) SAE /l/ is apical alveolar (with the tip of the tongue on the alveolar ridge), while Spanish /l/ is laminal alveolar, often labeled dental (articulated on the alveolar ridge with the blade of the tongue just above the tip); (2) SAE /l/ is velarized in certain contexts (as in both liquids in loll), while Spanish /l/ lacks this velarization in all contexts. (Somewhat confusingly, the tradition in phonetics and phonology is to term velarized /l/ dark and the unvelarized variant light.) From the description above, I gather that “heavy L” is laminal. (On the other hand, /t d n/ are also laminal in Spanish but apical in English, but no one seems to have commented on that feature in Miami.)

In the NYT yesterday, “Rutgers Updates Its Anthem to Include Women” by Ariel Kaminer:

No one song could ever capture all the motivations that bring students to a college campus, all the experiences they have there or all the ways those experiences changed their lives.

But “On the Banks of the Old Raritan,” the alma mater of Rutgers University, is particularly inadequate. “My father sent me to old Rutgers,” the song proudly began, “And resolved that I should be a man.”

Women were first enrolled in Rutgers in 1972 and now make up half the student body. It was time for fresh words.

[So] this past Saturday, the Rutgers football team was accompanied for the first time by a new version of those lyrics, retooled by Patrick Gardner, the university’s director of choral studies. “From far and near we came to Rutgers,” the song now begins, “and resolved to learn all that we can.”

Rutgers is the latest formerly all-male college to bring its alma mater in line with its new demographics.

“Men of Dartmouth” made sense in the 19th century when men were the only students, but not in 1988, when the words were changed to “Dear old Dartmouth.”

Then there’s Princeton. From Wikipedia:

The first women were admitted to Princeton in the late 1960s and the [1859] song “Old Nassau” was considered sexist by 1987, when Princeton had reached 35% female enrollment.

… The refrain was changed [in 1987] from “In praise of Old Nassau, my boys, hurrah, hurrah, hurrah! Her sons will give while they shall live, three cheers for Old Nassau.” to “In praise of Old Nassau, we sing, hurrah, hurrah, hurrah! Our hearts will give, while we shall live, three cheers for Old Nassau.”

Bonus note on alma mater. Usually in caps and in construction with a possessive (as in my Alma Mater), the expression can refer to a school, college, or university one once attended; or in lower case (as in the NYT story above), it can refer to the anthem of such an institution.

In the NYT Magazine on the 6th, a “Who Made This?” piece by Pagan Kennedy on movie popcorn, with this accompanying note on a metaphor:

The industry term for unpopped kernels: spinsters

One commenter disputed this claim, saying that the correct term was old maids. Other sources:

What I do not care for is all those unpopped kernels at the bottom of the bag. Incidentally, these kernels are referred to as “spinsters” among popcorn aficionados.  (link)

Unpopped popcorn kernels have been dubbed “old maids” in popular slang, since just as unmarried women that never had children, they do not “pop”. (link)

Apparently there are alternative usages.

From NOAD2 on spinster (originally ‘a woman who spins’):

an unmarried woman, typically an older woman beyond the usual age for marriage.

The word has a derogatory tone that goes beyond an unmarried woman. NOAD2 treats old maid as explicitly derogatory:

derogatory   a single woman regarded as too old for marriage.

On Facebook, Ann Burlingham has passed on this posting (from February 1st), “Why Are We Referring to Women as Girls?” by Yashar Ali, about men referring to women in the workplace as girls. (Note: Yashar Ali is a man.)

Important qualification: The piece is entirely about language use in the workplace, where Ali argues conventions of mutual respect should hold sway. In this context it’s demeaning to refer to women as girls (while referring to men as men). In other contexts, the opposition might be between girls and boys or between girls and guys or in fact between girls and men. (I’ve posted a number of times on these words and their use in different social contexts.)

Ann noted that when you try to explain this issue to people (especially men), you’re likely to be greeted by blank incomprehension; “that’s just the way things are”, people will say. It’s just the way we talk about women and men — disregarding the many connotations of girl.

And that brings me to gal, which I thought had mostly gone out of style, until a few weeks ago when I overheard three Silicon Valley types (men in their 30s) having lunch together and talking, again and again, about the women in their workplace as gals.

The origin of gal looks pretty clear. From OED3 (March 2008):

> Representing a colloquial or regional (U.S. or southern English) pronunciation of girl n. Compare gel n.
colloq. and regional (now chiefly N. Amer.). = girl n. (in various senses) [first citation 1795]

2005   Metro (Toronto) 2 Mar. 23/2   Faux pearls in antique cream and petal pink shades, perfect whether you’re a straight ahead girly-girl or a sassy gal who wears her pearls with a wink.

Note the contrast in the 2005 cite between a girly-girl and a sassy gal: gals have style and brass.

That brings me to Our Gal Sunday. From Wikipedia:

Our Gal Sunday was an American soap opera produced by Frank and Anne Hummert and heard on CBS from 1937 to 1959.

The origin of this radio series was a 1904 Broadway production, Sunday, which starred Ethel Barrymore. This play was the source of the catchphrase, “That’s all there is, there isn’t any more.”

The Hummerts adapted the Broadway play into a long-running melodramatic radio serial about a Colorado orphan who marries a British aristocrat.

… The show opened with this question:

Once again, we present Our Gal Sunday, the story of an orphan girl named Sunday from the little mining town of Silver Creek, Colorado, who in young womanhood married England’s richest, most handsome lord, Lord Henry Brinthrope. The story that asks the question: Can this girl from the little mining town in the West find happiness as the wife of a wealthy and titled Englishman?

“Red River Valley” was the series theme music.

I was oddly fond of the serial — maybe just because of the lead-in text, which tickled me.

From roughly the same time, Mary Higgins Clark’s 1931 novel Our Gal Sunday. On the Clark site:

A dashing ex-president [Henry Parker Britland IV -- wealthy, worldly, and popular] and his young congresswoman bride [Sunday] become an irresistible sleuthing duo in four acclaimed stories from the Queen of Suspense.

Both pair a wealthy, successful man with a younger, plucky, clever woman.

The titles almost surely echo the expression gal Friday in my/our/his gal Friday, a variant of girl Friday. From Wikipedia:

Friday is one of the main characters of Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe. Robinson Crusoe names the man, with whom he cannot at first communicate, Friday because they first meet on that day. The character is the source of the expression “Man Friday”, used to describe a male personal assistant or servant, especially one who is particularly competent or loyal.

… The term Man Friday has become an idiom, still in mainstream usage, to describe an especially faithful servant or one’s best servant or right-hand man. The female equivalent is Girl Friday. The title of the movie His Girl Friday alludes to it and may have popularised it.

On the movie (a famous screwball comedy), from IMDB:

A newspaper editor uses every trick in the book to keep his ace reporter ex-wife from remarrying. Director: Howard Hawks. Stars: Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, Ralph Bellamy.

In all these X Friday composites, the referent is subordinate but also competent — manifesting a kind of strength of their own. Gal (versus girl) can add a certain amount of pluck or brass — at least for people who can use the word unselfconsciously (as I cannot).

(I suspect that for those guys at Gordon Biersch, gal was a variant of girl that lacked the girly connotations for them.)

I’ve posted this on Elizabeth Zwicky’s Facebook timeline, where it’s been appreciated. Now to give it a somewhat more permanent home, on this blog.

From the website One Last Blog on Nothing of 12/18/13, “One Weird Old Trick to Undermine the Patriarchy” by Michelle Nijhuis, beginning:

My five-year-old insists that Bilbo Baggins is a girl.

The first time she made this claim, I protested. Part of the fun of reading to your kids, after all, is in sharing the stories you loved as a child. And in the story I knew, Bilbo was a boy. A boy hobbit. (Whatever that entails.)

The story continues:

Then I thought: What the hell, it’s just a pronoun. My daughter wants Bilbo to be a girl, so a girl she will be.

And you know what? The switch was easy. Bilbo, it turns out, makes a terrific heroine. She’s tough, resourceful, humble, funny, and uses her wits to make off with a spectacular piece of jewelry. Perhaps most importantly, she never makes an issue of her gender — and neither does anyone else.