For example, I noticed it last night during the final time-out of the Bruins-Lightning game (Game Six of the NHL Eastern Conference finals): Boston’s coach was going over some plays on a little whiteboard, and the Versus Network announcer pointed out to the TV audience that we could see one of the players “shaking his head ‘yes’ — he’s on board with the coach’s plan,” or something along those lines. The player in question was, of course, nodding his head, not shaking it.

I first noticed this usage, which has always seemed extremely odd to me, twenty years ago, when I was having a (face-to-face) conversation with someone who told a third party (on the telephone) that I was “shaking [my] head.” His intention was to let the third party know that I agreed, but I was alarmed — I didn’t want the third party, who’d just been told I was “shaking” my head, to get the mistaken impression that I was disagreeing, when what I was actually doing was nodding my head (to show that I agreed). If I were talking on the phone and someone told me that an unseen third party was “shaking his head,” I’d assume that to mean that that person was indicating his/her disagreement with whatever we were talking about.

After the game last night, I played around on Google for a while to see if I could find examples of anybody else using the term shaking one’s head to mean nodding one’s head, but I couldn’t figure out the right search terms to use: all I could come up with were many discussions of cultures where those signs are reversed (apparently, the Bulgarians are among the only people on Earth who nod their heads to indicate “no” and shake their heads to indicate “yes”).

Questions:

1. Has anyone else ever noticed this: someone using the term “shaking one’s head” [which, to me and most other English speakers, means turning one's head side-to-side several times] to mean “nodding one’s head” [i.e. moving one's head up and down several times]?
2. Do these people also say “nodding one’s head” [side-to-side] to mean “shaking one’s head” [up and down]? In other words, have they switched the two terms’ meanings around? Or do they use “shaking one’s head” to mean both “shaking” and “nodding”? My gut feeling is that it’s the latter, but I have no proof of this; all I can say is that I have never actually heard anyone say “nodding his head” to mean “moving his head side-to-side,” but I have heard “shaking his head” to mean “moving his head up and down” many times.
3. Could it be a regional-usage thing, maybe? Is it just that there is some part of America where people say “shaking one’s head” to mean both “shaking” and “nodding”? Or is it that certain individuals just say it this way, for obscure reasons of their own?

I would love feedback on this one, readers, if you have anything to say about this.

Rand, whose books are full of masterful, sexually dominating heroes, quickly fell in love with this confused boy, whom she decided was the “intellectual heir” she had been waiting for.

If you’re ever confused about when to use who and when to use whom, use the “he/him-substitution” method.

Who = subject = HE
Whom = object = HIM

You can see where the author of this book review went wrong if you use this “he/him” method.

Take the clause where the author went astray: whom she decided was the “intellectual heir” she had been waiting for.

First, see if “who” would work. Try substituting “he” for “who”:

(1) She decided he was the "intellectual heir" she had been waiting for.

That looks and sounds like good English. So far, so good. No problem with who.

Next, try substituting “him” for “whom,” and look what happens:

(2) *She decided him was the "intellectual heir" she had been waiting for.

Yikes! That’s not how we say it in English, readers. That’s ungrammatical.

“Him was the intellectual heir” is obviously ungrammatical. Thus, you can’t say “she fell in love with this boy… whom she decided was the intellectual heir.” No, “she fell in love with this boy… who she decided was the intellectual heir.”

Whom is worthless, readers. We don’t need it in English anymore. It’s a relic of the long-ago days when English still had a functioning case system.

Even college-educated native speakers of English have trouble using whom correctly. This is OK — whom serves no purpose. It’s a relic. It would be all for the best if we would just let whom die a natural death, like it would have done hundreds of years ago if left to its own devices. But it hangs on artificially, deployed almost randomly on occasions when someone is consciously trying to write or speak in a “formal” register.

Notice, too, how the author of the book review had no compunction whatsoever about ending that sentence with a preposition. That’s good, that’s healthy. That’s how people use English in real life. Most educated speakers of English understand that “never end a sentence with a preposition” was always a very silly, arbitrary “rule” (a “rule” that was dragged screaming into English from Latin grammar, no less), and it no longer raises eyebrows when we ignore that ridiculous “rule” even on semi-formal occasions (such as a NYT book review).

But here, the author was so afraid that who might be “wrong” that he fell victim to hypercorrection and stuck in whom instead.

It’s time to say goodbye to whom, a relic that has long since outlived its usefulness.

The Welsh-language text in the sign above reads, “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated.”

Huh?

Well, you can probably guess what happened:

When officials asked for the Welsh translation of a road sign, they thought the reply was what they needed.

Unfortunately, the e-mail response to Swansea council said in Welsh: “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated”.

So that was what went up under the English version which barred lorries from a road near a supermarket.

“When they’re proofing signs, they should really use someone who speaks Welsh,” said journalist Dylan Iorwerth.

Swansea Council became lost in translation when it was looking to halt heavy goods vehicles using a road near an Asda store in the Morriston area.

All official road signs in Wales are bilingual, so the local authority e-mailed its in-house translation service for the Welsh version of: “No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only”.

The reply duly came back and officials set the wheels in motion to create the large sign in both languages.

The notice went up and all seemed well – until Welsh speakers began pointing out the embarrassing error.

If you’re going to claim on your biography page that you “speak Arabic,” you might want to think about getting the most basic Arabic phrases right.

There’s no such thing as “Alhamdillullah.” This is a mistake you’ve made many, many times. We’ve even talked about it before.

The phrase is al-hamdu lillah. Not al-hamdi lullah or “Alhamdillullah.” Furthermore, it doesn’t mean “Praise Allah.” It means “Praise [be] to God,” or simply Thank God.

Most Arabs say it about fifty times a day. You might want to try getting it right once in a while. That would make your claims of linguistic prowess a little easier to believe.

Just something to think about.

Love,
Dumpendebat

McCain may not rally a crowd, but there’s there there that could plausibly be commander-in-chief of a nation at war (really, we are, remember? It’s not just over there.).

Has anyone ever produced a worse sentence while attempting to write English?

[I]f you have to explain your decisions on your website, you’re already in trouble. Because that invites the rejected advertiser to critique your editorial content going back to the year dot…

Was that a typo, I wondered, or is it just an expression I’m not familiar with? It turned out to be the latter:

The year dot

Meaning: A very long time ago; too long ago to be dated.

This is a new one to me.

She thinks it good that American college students are getting interested in the Arabic language, and of course I agree with her. We sorely, sorely need Arabic speakers, and lots of them, to help do the work that genuinely helps to protect us from terrorists. The “War on Terror” is going to be won by intelligence officers and law-enforcement officers, not by B-52 bombers and infantry divisions. We need to have linguists who can monitor and translate communications in Arabic (not to mention other important languages such as Urdu, Persian, Dari, Pashto, etc).

However, she also seems to feel that Arabic language classes should only be taken by the right kind of people:

We don’t know who it is that is taking Arabic. Are they Tom and Jane from Podunkville, Iowa, who are basically pro-American and don’t have an agenda–the ideal FBI and CIA translators? Or is it Hamida and Suhail, whose parents came here respectively from Ramallah and Peshawar and hate America? We don’t want or need 24,000 of those.

Yes, keep those damn America-haters out of our college classes, by all means.

She also reveals, yet again, that she really doesn’t know much about the Arabic language:

Arabic as taught on most college campuses is classical Arabic, not the currently used kind, which involves different national dialects of a more modern Arabic. As I learned when I was in college and took Arabic, that kind of Arabic is mostly useless and not the kind we need to translate documents and surveillance tapes.

Let’s take this paragraph point-by-point, readers, so that we can clear up some misconceptions and get a better understanding of the problem of Arabic-language pedagogy. There are some interesting and important issues at stake here, and it matters whether we describe the problem accurately.

Item 1. “Arabic as taught on most college campuses is classical Arabic”

This is true, pretty much. Most Arabic classes will concentrate on Modern Standard Arabic, which is more or less the same thing as Classical Arabic.

Classical Arabic is the language of the Koran and other early Islamic texts. It is not a living language — it has no native speakers. No one grows up speaking and thinking in Classical Arabic. However, it is regarded with the highest possible prestige throughout the Arabic-speaking world, as it is held to be the language spoken by God and His angels in Heaven. Millions of people continue to learn Classical Arabic because of its high prestige, and because it gives one access to the corpus of Islamic scripture and related writings.

Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) was developed out of Classical Arabic, starting in the 19th century. Classical vocabulary was adapted to encompass modern concepts and terminology; grammar and syntax were slightly simplified as well. Modern Standard Arabic is the Arabic language used in TV news broadcasts, radio shows, formal speeches, and is the language in which Arabic books, magazines, and newspapers are written. It’s taught as a subject in schools, and at higher levels it’s also used as the medium of instruction. Thus, all educated speakers of Arabic, no matter what country they live in, have at least some degree of ability with MSA.

I think it’s fair to say that almost all Arabic speakers can understand MSA, but only highly-educated speakers are able to produce grammatically-correct MSA, at least for more than a couple of sentences at a time. Arabic conversations, depending on the situation and level of formality, go up and down a sort of dialect continuum between informal dialect and formal Classical Arabic. MSA can also serve as a sort of lingua franca between Arabic speakers whose dialects may not be mutually intelligible (a Moroccan and a Syrian, for example, might have real trouble understanding one another — their dialects are roughly as different from each other as are Spanish and Italian). MSA is not exactly the same as Classical Arabic, but it’s very close.

Item 2. “… not the currently used kind …”

Wrong. There’s not an opposition between Classical/MSA and “the currently used [sic] kind.” This is misleading. (There is an opposition between Classical/MSA and the national dialects, as we will see in Item 3 below.) Classical/MSA is very much in use today, just not as the day-to-day language that Arabic-speakers use at home, on the street, and at work. If you’re going to listen to the news or read a newspaper article, you have to understand MSA.

Item 3. “… which involves different national dialects of a more modern Arabic.”

A charitable reading of this baffling statement would be that Debbie S. thinks that Egyptian Arabic, Syrian Arabic, Gulf Arabic, etc, etc, are all dialects of MSA, which is of course not the case at all.

There was never one single Arabic language from which all variations of the language descended. That’s simply not how human languages work, as a matter of fact. There was never one single English language from which all variations of English descended, either. The dialect that has been considered “standard English” has been changing and developing alongside its cousin dialects (Cockney, Lancashire, etc) for hundreds of years.

So, too, the various versions of Arabic (Egyptian, Gulf, Libyan, Lebanese, etc, etc), like all living languages, have all been changing and developing, simultaneously, as long as people have been speaking these languages. You have to go all the way back to the theoretical Proto-Semitic, or at least back to the first “Arabic” dialects of the Arabian peninsula (ca. 2000 BC) to start talking about one language from which the others developed.

In the Arabic-speaking world, there are indeed “national dialects.” Ethnologue counts thirty-five of them. There is a good deal of variation among these dialects, to the point where some of them are not even mutually intelligible, as mentioned above.

Here’s an analogy to help you understand the relationship between Classical/MSA and the national variations of Arabic: Imagine if Latin were still the official language of Italy. All newspapers and books would be in Latin. Latin would be taught as a school subject, and then be used as a medium of instruction in the classroom as students got older. Children would grow up speaking Italian at home, and everyone would speak Italian to each other for all their day-to-day communications, but all mass media and the government would conduct their business in Latin. Italian would seldom be written down at all, and there would be no standard for the written language. Many Italian people would express open disrespect for their own Italian language, saying things like “Italian has no grammar” and “Italian is just a broken dialect of Latin, it’s not a real language.”

Now imagine this situation in Egypt, not Italy. Substitute Classical/MSA for Latin and Egyptian Arabic for Italian, and you have some idea of the relationship between Classical/MSA and Egyptian Arabic — that’s how it actually is in the Arabic-speaking world. Classical Arabic is considered the “true Arabic language” and is held in the absolute highest esteem by Arabic-speaking people. It’s a sort of sociolinguistic glue that holds together the Arabic-speaking world.

[Of all the variations of Arabic, only Maltese has "broken away" from the mainstream of Arabic dialects to become considered a separate language (rather than just another Arabic dialect). This is mostly because Maltese people are Christians and do not have the same absolute reverence for Classical Arabic (the language of the Koran) as do the rest of the predominantly-Muslim Arabic-speaking world. Maltese, aside from being written with the Roman alphabet and having a large number of loanwords from Italian, could just as easily, from a linguistic standpoint, be considered a dialect called "Maltese Arabic" rather than a language called "Maltese."]

This situation (high-prestige language used for some situations, low-prestige language used for other situations) is known as diglossia. If you are interested, I highly recommend you look at “Perspectives on Arabic Diglossia” (Andrew Freeman, 1996), which is available online.

Item 4. “As I learned when I was in college and took Arabic, that kind of Arabic is mostly useless”

Well, “useless” is kind of a loaded term. It depends on what you want to be able to do.

If all you want is to be able to speak to people and understand what they’re saying, then Classical/MSA is not going to immediately help you out much. Even at the height of my own Arabic skills, after 47 weeks of MSA, I could look at an Egyptian movie and barely understand a word the characters were saying. If you really want to understand spoken Arabic, you really need training in one or more of the national dialects.

By the same token, you cannot read Arabic without Classical/MSA training. The national dialects are not written. All newspapers, magazines, books, letters, etc, etc, are written in Classical/MSA. Without Classical/MSA, you cannot understand the Arabic mass media, either (news broadcasts, many TV shows, etc).

Which makes more sense: to study MSA first, and then work on one or more regional dialects later? Or to start out with a dialect and supplement it with “formal” Classical/MSA later? That’s an open question, readers. There are very much two schools of thought. It’s simply incorrect, though, to say that MSA is “useless” — that’s a grotesque oversimplification. Yes, it’s frustrating to spend several semesters studying a language and then perhaps finding oneself still unable to have a simple conversation at the end of it, but you can’t really “know” Arabic without a firm grounding in Classical/MSA. Yes, you need a dialect as well if you really want to speak the language and get along on a day-to-day basis in an Arabic-speaking place, and you have to understand someone’s dialect to understand everything they’re saying, of course; but that doesn’t mean MSA is “useless.”

Item 5. “… and not the kind we need to translate documents and surveillance tapes.”

Right and wrong: you can’t translate a document without MSA, so that part is 100% wrong, but you need to understand the dialect to fully translate a surveillance tape, so that part is right.

It’s not so simple. Arabic is a tough language for English-speakers to learn (although it’s really not as hard as you might think, because its grammar is pleasantly regular: it follows its own rules to the letter), and the problem of diglossia makes it even harder: you kind of have to learn one-and-a-half languages (Classical/MSA plus a dialect) to really “know” the language enough to be really useful. MSA isn’t enough by itself, and neither is a dialect. The good news is that knowing one of the two gives you a tremendous leg up on learning the other (just as it’s much easier to learn Spanish if you already know Italian or Catalan, let’s say, although that’s not a perfect analogy).

It’s encouraging to read that Arabic is now one of the top ten languages studied at American colleges and universities. We’re going to have a lot to do with the Arabic-speaking world for many, many years to come, and we will need all the Arabic speakers we can get. College classes in MSA are not going to make people ready to join the FBI and get cracking as an Arabic interpreter right away, that’s true. But a solid foundation in the language is the very best place to start.

Greenwald points out that it used to be considered a pretty bad thing to throw around loaded terms like “Nazi” and “holocaust,” because of the obvious danger of trivialization that abuse of such terms will eventually lead to: If anyone I don’t approve of is a “Nazi,” then the word “Nazi” has lost its meaning.

These days, “Nazi” has become trivialized to the point that even Oprah has been called a “Nazi” because Barack Obama is the only presidential candidate she’s invited to her talk show (see Dave Neiwert’s post for more). Calling Oprah a “Nazi” has got to be the ne plus ultra of Nazi trivialization.

Every time we abuse the word “Nazi,” readers, we’re trivializing the Holocaust and disrespecting its victims. Everyone should try to keep that in mind.

Remember Orwell’s warning: “[Our language] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.“

The Arabic word allah means “God.” Just as the French word dieu means “God” and the Spanish word dios means “God.”

We’ve been over this before. Even wingnutty scaremonger Daniel Pipes has no problem admitting it.

Alas, there will always be Know-Nothings like Crazy Pammy, who got so frightened on the 11th of September 2001 that they’re more than willing to pretend otherwise. Have a look at this comment left by one of her stalwart readers:

[Allah] is purportedly the Arabic word for ‘god’. In reality, Allah was the Moon God in the pre-Islamic pantheon of 360 Arabic tribal gods in the Kabah in Mecca: the prima partes [sic], if you will. Smacks of polytheism, doesn’t it.

The writer’s botched Latin tag (he meant to say primum inter pares (“first among equals”)) doesn’t help his credibility much. He’s all over the intertrons shouting about “pagan moon gods,” butchering several languages at once.

Of course, even that was a sanitized version of what happens at Muslim honor killings. Usually there are no well-wishes for Allah’s mercy on the “dishonorable” victim. Instead, it’s the general, Allah Hu Akbar [Allah is the Greatest, as in "Greater" than other gods], asserting the “godliness” of the despicable cold-blooded murder.

Readers, what the hell is “Allah Hu Akbar” supposed to be? There’s no such thing as “Allah Hu Akbar.” Debbie Schlussel does not know Arabic, readers. Here’s a micro-lesson for those who are interested:

Arabic has three grammatical cases: nominative, accusative, and genitive. The nominative case is used for the subject of this simple nominal sentence (I am deliberately keeping this discussion as simple as possible). Arabic nouns and adjectives are marked for case and definiteness. The marking for nominative case/definite is -u.

The phrase Debbie Schussel is trying to think of is, of course, allahu akbar (“God is most great”). This phrase is known to Muslims around the world as takbiir, and it’s so very common that it’s one of the first phrases learned by any student of the Arabic language.

The word allah (God) is marked as definite (it’s a proper noun) and as nominative (it’s the subject). There’s no copula in Arabic, so there’s no verb in this simple nominal sentence. The word akbar, appearing as it does at the end of this nominal sentence, is left unmarked when this sentence is spoken or read aloud (Semitic linguists call this a “pausal form”); it would be written akbaru.

There’s no “Hu” in Arabic, readers. There is a third-person masculine enclitic pronoun -hu, but not a standalone word. No one who knows anything about Arabic would ever write “Allah Hu Akbar.”

You’ll encounter other incorrect forms of allahu akbar on the Internet: “Allah Al-Akbar,” “Allah O Akbar,” “Allah Akbar,” etc, etc. Beware of people who get it wrong, if they’re trying to pass themselves off as experts on Islam and/or speakers of Arabic. The correct phrase is allahu akbar.

UPDATE, 2007/08/09 20:40 EDT

The Costco Coulter has silently corrected her post. Here’s a screenshot I took earlier, just for posterity: