Over my spring break I ate at the Scenic Cafe in Duluth with my parents. It's a lovely place with amazing food (I had these sushi tacos that were to die for), but it is a little prone to pretension. This experience, and others at fancy restaurants, led my dad and I to come up with the formula for writing a pretentious menu.
It's simple:
Change every food item that would usually be written in the singular to the plural and every food item that would usually be written plural to singular.
This doesn't really make sense until you hear some examples, so here we go.
Beligan waffle with strawberry and whipped creams 9
Stew with carrot and beet 7
Breaded mozzarella stick with tomato sauces 7
Raviolis with mushroom and cheeses 11
Cracker with cheeses and grape 5
And then of course, there are some structural guidelines. Put the main food item first and then the descriptive items. Of course, italicize it. Then put the price after it in whole numbers with no dollar sign. Your prices should also be odd numbers.
And there you go, a fancy restaurant menu!
Thursday, April 9, 2015
"He looks like a Tom"
I'm sort of into linguistics. I took an entry level class last semester, and I plan to take more classes in the future, possibly even minor in it just for fun. It's honestly the most interesting field of study I've ever encountered and something I can talk about endlessly.
But I'm not always just repeating things I've heard in lectures or read in books. Sometimes I actually have an original thought of my own!
Everyone is familiar with the phenomenon (exemplified in this post's title) where you attach a meaning to a name. Whether it be a personality or a physical trait, we all have generalized names in this way.
Names do often have meanings, but no one who is not named that name knows the meaning. It hearkens back to the origin of the name, and is usually not remembered. So names are probably the most arbitrary types of words we have, especially among nouns. They carry no meaning on their own, or even in linguistic context -- until we assign it through experience.
We encounter a lot of blond, preppy Stephanies. The word gets a meaning. We associate the arbitrary word Helen with old white women. In the case of Tom, it's tall, intelligent and well-spoken men. In my experience, anyway. Everyone has different experiences. Everyone has names colored for them, positively or negatively, by these experiences.
What does this have to do with linguistics? Well, it demonstrates perfectly how semantic language acquisition happens. That is, through experiences and associations. Young children are specialized to do this, and are much better at distinguishing between sounds and words than adults are.
(As a side note, this loss of ability in sound recognition is helpful because it makes you more efficient at speaking and understanding the language you acquire. Children are receptive to acquiring any language -- adults become very good at the language they acquire so that they don't have to put in much effort.)
So children listen to words and make associations, and they're not always accurate. Sometimes they overapply -- for example, calling all four-legged animals a "dog." Sometimes they underapply -- calling only their family pet a "dog." A wider range of experience leads to a more accurate understanding of meaning.
This too explains how you can make it quite far in life thinking a word means something that it doesn't. For me, I thought that "approximate" meant "exact" (a significant misunderstanding) until well into my teen years. Every time I saw or heard the word "approximate" it was used in a context where it could have easily meant "exact" and where it might have made sense for a fancier sounding word to be used.
Adults still learn word meanings from context and experience, but we also learn from dictionaries. Children acquire all of their early vocabulary simply from listening and observing and making connections. The fact that almost everybody has made associations with names and meaning shows first that adults are still using this semantic acquisition capacity and second that we are not entirely satisfied with the arbitrariness of names.
People want everything to have meaning, especially our words. The words that lack prescriptive meaning almost entirely are names, so we tend to give them descriptive meaning by associating them with our experiences. We group people with the same name together and consider them as a type, seeking similarities. There's really no reason to do this -- except for our endless search for meaning.
Next time you tell someone that their name suits them or that they look like a Karen, realize that this is only possible through your amazing language abilities.
But I'm not always just repeating things I've heard in lectures or read in books. Sometimes I actually have an original thought of my own!
Everyone is familiar with the phenomenon (exemplified in this post's title) where you attach a meaning to a name. Whether it be a personality or a physical trait, we all have generalized names in this way.
Names do often have meanings, but no one who is not named that name knows the meaning. It hearkens back to the origin of the name, and is usually not remembered. So names are probably the most arbitrary types of words we have, especially among nouns. They carry no meaning on their own, or even in linguistic context -- until we assign it through experience.
We encounter a lot of blond, preppy Stephanies. The word gets a meaning. We associate the arbitrary word Helen with old white women. In the case of Tom, it's tall, intelligent and well-spoken men. In my experience, anyway. Everyone has different experiences. Everyone has names colored for them, positively or negatively, by these experiences.
What does this have to do with linguistics? Well, it demonstrates perfectly how semantic language acquisition happens. That is, through experiences and associations. Young children are specialized to do this, and are much better at distinguishing between sounds and words than adults are.
(As a side note, this loss of ability in sound recognition is helpful because it makes you more efficient at speaking and understanding the language you acquire. Children are receptive to acquiring any language -- adults become very good at the language they acquire so that they don't have to put in much effort.)
So children listen to words and make associations, and they're not always accurate. Sometimes they overapply -- for example, calling all four-legged animals a "dog." Sometimes they underapply -- calling only their family pet a "dog." A wider range of experience leads to a more accurate understanding of meaning.
This too explains how you can make it quite far in life thinking a word means something that it doesn't. For me, I thought that "approximate" meant "exact" (a significant misunderstanding) until well into my teen years. Every time I saw or heard the word "approximate" it was used in a context where it could have easily meant "exact" and where it might have made sense for a fancier sounding word to be used.
Adults still learn word meanings from context and experience, but we also learn from dictionaries. Children acquire all of their early vocabulary simply from listening and observing and making connections. The fact that almost everybody has made associations with names and meaning shows first that adults are still using this semantic acquisition capacity and second that we are not entirely satisfied with the arbitrariness of names.
People want everything to have meaning, especially our words. The words that lack prescriptive meaning almost entirely are names, so we tend to give them descriptive meaning by associating them with our experiences. We group people with the same name together and consider them as a type, seeking similarities. There's really no reason to do this -- except for our endless search for meaning.
Next time you tell someone that their name suits them or that they look like a Karen, realize that this is only possible through your amazing language abilities.
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