Deborah Fallows: Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons In Life, Love, And Language

From Booklist: Fallows manages to take the relatively dry subject of translation and create a warm and witty memoir. Dwelling less on her own feelings then on the intricacies of language mastery, she shares experiences after she and her husband moved to China that taught her just how complex Mandarin can be. Such as the fact that there are 400 syllables in Mandarin as opposed to 10 times that number in English, making tone crucial in conversation. Fallows makes all this fascinating by writing in a thoroughly engaging manner that not only invites readers into her experiences, but also delights them with her discoveries. There is confusion with a Cantonese cab driver, the manicurist who envisioned “almost perfect happiness,” and the employee at Taco Bell who thought Fallows wanted to hug him (she was inquiring about takeout). From observations about maps, naming children, and the struggle over one language for a nation where over 300 million speak something other than Mandarin, Fallows takes readers on a ride through Chinese culture that is as entertaining as it is informative.





From Time Magazine: Deborah Fallows and her husband, the Atlantic's James Fallows, are no strangers to life in a foreign country. Over the course of their careers they've upped sticks and moved to foreign lands, from Africa to Southeast Asia. But even their many years as expatriates could not have prepared them for what they would experience throughout their three years living in a country as overwhelming and chaotic as China. In her book, Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in Life, Love, and Language, Fallows, who holds a Ph.D. in linguistics from Harvard University, details the struggles and triumphs she had while learning one of the world's most difficult languages. She spoke to TIME about what her study of Mandarin taught her about life in China, the country's dizzying transformation and the value of learning languages.





From The New York Times: [Deborah Fallows] spent three years living in China with her husband, the journalist James Fallows. Since she’s a linguist by training, her method of getting under the skin of the country was to immerse herself in its language. In “Dreaming in Chinese,” she uses key phrases and concepts to unlock aspects of the society that interested or surprised her, casting light along the way on many idiosyncrasies of the Chinese view of the world. Fallows doesn’t arrive with many preconceptions. Instead, she takes the Chinese as they see and present themselves. And she soon discovers that what the Chinese think is important isn’t always what we think is important. One thing they’re interested in is ensuring good luck. This explains why the Beijing Olympics began on Aug. 8, 2008, at 8:08 p.m. Eight, ba, rhymes with fa, “as in fa cai, which means ‘to become wealthy,’ ” making it a very auspicious number. And even though Aug. 8 was well into the rainy season, it didn’t rain.

Jonathon Keats: Virtual Words: Language on the Edge of Science and Technology

The Boston Globe recently wrote about the book: “Virtual Words,” by Jonathon Keats, who writes the Jargon Watch column in WIRED magazine. We might even be able to argue that his book is from at least a few minutes in the future — these are the jargon words that might become consumer-grade English. “Virtual Words” isn’t really a dictionary, but a collection of essays on new terms, and Keats makes no claim to be a lexicographer (although his author photo includes a very lexicographical bow tie). Instead, he refreshingly divides his book into six categories: Discovery, Innovation, Commentary, Promotion, Slang, and Neologism. Find that Boston Globe article here. From NPR's Talk of the Nation, Science Friday; "How Science and Technology Influence Language:" FLATOW: How do certain words catch on when other words don't? Mr. KEATS: It seems to me that the words that catch on are those that are probably least clever, that call least attention to themselves and that really kind of percolate from general usage, whereas the words that are particularly fun or funny, they may come into existence, and they may go viral, but they tend to die out almost as quickly as they came about. FLATOW: Do you have some favorite new words from this year? Mr. KEATS: Yes, I've been watching, as a result of my work in Wired, and one word that I really like right now is hygroelectricity, which is not hydroelectricity, it's spelled H-Y-G-R-O, and what it refers to is electricity that is taken from the humidity in the air, much as lightning is a lightening is a manifestation of this. And what I like about it is that it makes concrete in a word an idea that is very new and really right now is in the earliest prototyping stage in a laboratory. And it has, I think, great potential as an alternative energy source, and because there is a word, there is something that we can call it, we can start talking about it and promoting it, tweeting it, if you will, and I think that that can really be as important as the technology itself in terms of whether it catches on. Find that NPR webpage here.

How Language is Changing from KERA's Think Podcast

Syndicated description:

[2010-12-20 13:00:00] From the archives: How is language changing and what do we lose when a language disappears forever? In July we talked with linguist and author David Crystal. His latest work is "A Little Book of Language" (Yale, 2010).

Download the podcast here. Other books by David Crystal: How Language Works, Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language, Words Words Words, Txtng: The Gr8 Db8, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language

Political Euphemisms from WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show by listenerservices@wnyc.org (WNYC, New York Publi

Ralph Keyes, author of many books including the new Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms, talks about the prevalence of euphemisms in our culture—particularly when talking politics.

Download that podcast here. The best review on the book that we've read so far, comes out of the National Post (Canada). Stephen Marche, there, covered the title, had these closing statements:

Pierre Bourdieu, the French sociologist, explained our tendency to euphemism as an expression of human selfishness: It gives us “the profit of saying and the profit of denying what is said.” The slipperiness of euphemisms explains their attraction to politicians, who hate making enemies among potential voters. The tendency to be inoffensive in language can have unfortunate consequences, however, both personally and politically. A recent article in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, “Who you calling obese, Doc?” debated the merits of adding “medically” in front of “obese” in an attempt to soften the stigma of the word: “Though lapsing into euphemism can soften a bleak diagnosis, it can also lead to confusion. Euphemism is no friend of precision. Thus doctors are sometimes faced with a dilemma: Should I be sensitive or accurate?” Even in the most crucial decisions of our life, we avoid direct language. “Human kind cannot bear very much reality,” T.S. Eliot wrote. Euphemania, while proving Eliot’s statement, also offers an appealing countertruth. The cowardice of euphemism is always defeated in the end. Everyone with a brain eventually works out what is being said. And then the codes become more amusing than confounding. An obituary of an English aristocrat once noted that the deceased lord was “an uncompromisingly direct ladies’ man.” Everybody knew that meant he was a public flasher. You just needed to know the code.

Find that National Post review here. The History Channel also featured the author and book; see that webpage here.

"'Pushing Up Daisies' And Our Passion For Euphemisms" from NPR's talk of the Nation

From "passed away" to "Chilean sea bass," euphemisms are a way to avoid unpleasant terms or phrases. But in Euphemania, Ralph Keyes argues that using them isn't necessarily lazy or evasive; it can actually be harder to not say what we mean and still get our point across. "Euphemisms can be incredibly playful and a lot of fun — very creative," Keyes tells NPR's Neal Conan. Take, for example, the euphemisms we use for death. Keyes notes that the French talk about "eating dandelions by the root," their version of "pushing up daisies." He also recalls an old high school classmate who once told him how the life insurance industry avoids the word: "When one of their policy holders became eligible for his benefits to go to his heirs, they said he was 'post-retirement.'" And one of the author's favorite modern expressions is "going offline."

Read that full NPR feature story here. Download the podcast here. Read a few pages of the book here. See also: The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear In "To Put It Another Way: True, we often try to avoid plain words, but we should be careful about what we call a euphemism," Eric Felten out of the Wall Street Journal writes that the author:

[...] assures us that his book "is not meant to be a compilation of euphemisms." And yet that is mostly what it is. Alas, while piling up examples, Mr. Keyes seems to exhibit a glib indifference to whether the euphemisms he cites were ever in real circulation. Consider one of the first examples he offers of military circumlocution: "Bombadiers no longer 'drop bombs,' " he writes; "they unleash vertically deployed antipersonnel devices." Really? Goodness knows the military is rife with jargon, some of it euphemistic. But just try to find an instance of "vertically deployed antipersonnel device" actually being used by the military. The source for this claim appears to be one of several books on euphemisms published over the past couple of decades. And those books seem to have based the claim on a brief item 20 years ago in the Quarterly Review of Doublespeak, a newsletter once compiled by William Lutz, a Rutgers University professor.

Read that WSJ piece here.