Mark Abley

"Watch Your Tongue: What Our Everyday Sayings and Idioms Figuratively Mean" by Mark Abley

BIBLIOGRAPHIC DETAILS
PRINT: © 10/30/2018; 978-1501172281; Simon & Schuster; 272 pages; unabridged. (Hardcover info from Amazon.com)
*DIGITAL: © 10/30/2018; 9781501172298; Simon & Schuster Canada; 272 pages; unabridged. (Kindle info from Amazon.com)
AUDIO: Not found in this format.
FILM: Not that I know of.

SERIES: No

SUMMARY/ EVALUATION:
SELECTED: I was listening to a podcast called "Way With Words" and one of the hosts mentioned this book. It sounded intriguing. I wasn’t able to find an audio version, so went with the Kindle version.
ABOUT: Idioms, sayings, clichés and the like are listed in an organized manner. Most, if not all are explained as to their meaning, and to the extent the author could find origins, those are included.
OVERALL IMPRESSION: So many of the phrases were so well known to me that I confess to periodic boredom, but still, I learned things and the bits on “plastic words” and on clichés were quite good.

AUTHOR:
Mark Abley. Excerpt from Wikipedia:
“Mark Abley (born 13 May 1955) is a Canadian poet, journalist, editor and nonfiction writer. Both his poetry and several nonfiction books express his interest in endangered languages. He has also published numerous magazine articles. In November 2022 Abley was awarded an honorary D.Litt. by the University of Saskatchewan for his writing career and for his services to Canadian literature.

A Rhodes Scholar, Abley settled in Montreal in 1983, where he has since based his career. His memoir of his father, The Organist: Fugues, Fatherhood, and a Fragile Mind, appeared in 2019. His newest book is a work of literary travel, Strange Bewildering Time: Istanbul to Kathmandu in the Last Year of the Hippie Trail (2023).”

From inside the digital book:
“MARK ABLEY, Rhodes Scholar and Guggenheim Fellow, is an awardwinning poet, journalist and author. His books include The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches from the Future of English and Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages, which was nominated for the Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize. Abley lives in Montreal, Quebec. MarkAbley.com”

GENRE:
Nonfiction; Language

SUBJECTS:
Sayings; Idioms; Clichés; Language

DEDICATION:
“For all the teachers who give their students the chance to find joy in words.”

SAMPLE QUOTATION:
Excerpt From: “Can a Leopard Change Its Spots”
“A cliché is a figure of speech that discourages original thinking. It stops ideas in their tracks—or it guides ideas along a single well-worn track. The literal meaning is relevant: in the early nineteenth century, a cliché was a method of printing an engraving, using a solid plate of metal. That plate had the name “stereotype.” Being a duplicate from the outset, a stereotype would perpetuate an original form without allowing any change. Both these terms were originally French, a fact that English speakers have done their best to ignore. (Ernest Bevin, a British cabinet minister, once rejected a draft speech by saying “This will not do . . . It just goes on from clitch to clitch.”) Printers in the past used clichés and stereotypes to provide for the mass reproduction of images. In our own time, politicians, governments and corporations often find the mass reproduction of stock phrases to be a very useful tactic.
Songwriters are fond of clichés, too.
• • •
Nineteen seventy was a good year for popular music. From “Bridge Over Troubled Water” to “Lola,” from “Big Yellow Taxi” to “My Sweet Lord,” memorable songs poured out across the airwaves of the English-speaking world. A number of them spoke directly or indirectly about pressing topics of the day—gender issues, spiritual quests, pollution, the Vietnam War. (Many of them were about sex, too.) But despite their quality and their impact, only a few of the best songs of 1970 approached the sales figures racked up by a young country singer named Lynn Anderson. Her version of “Rose Garden” was a country-pop crossover hit with a catchy tune and a set of lyrics made up almost entirely of clichés.
Think I’m exaggerating? Then consider the following phrases, all of which the song invokes:
Sharing the good times. Promising the moon. Sweet talk. Still waters that run deep. Smiling for a while. Looking before you leap. Dreams of silver platters and diamond rings combine with the recurrent image of a rose garden to create a familiar backdrop for the secondhand emotions on which, then and now, Top 40 radio thrives.
Few pop songs are immune to clichés. But while many songs include a few clichés, “Rose Garden” contains little else. Even on a single hearing, its lyrics are as routine and reassuring as a double cheeseburger with french fries on the side. They offer no challenges, raise no questions, incite no debates. The song serves up the verbal equivalent of high-carb comfort food in words that are neither abstract nor original. “Rose Garden” was massively popular. Familiarity doesn’t always breed contempt—it can also breed large record sales.
Apart from their role in paying songwriters’ mortgages, clichés have their uses. In his book Words, Words, Words, the linguist David Crystal mounts a shrewd defense of them: “They can fill an awkward gap in a conversation. They can be a lexical lifejacket when we are stuck for something to say . . . Think of the required politeness of regular commuters on a train. Think of the forced interactions at cocktail parties. Or the desperate platitudes which follow a funeral. These are the kinds of occasion which give clichés their right to be.” These are solid practical justifications. But I think the power of clichés goes deeper.
At a time when many of us feel the world is spinning out of control, clichés offer a little much-needed consolation. If Earth could seem a nerve-racking planet in 1970, how much scarier it is today. Clichés and platitudes deliver a quick hit of Valium to the wounded soul. What goes around, comes around. The rest is history. It is what it is.”

RATING: 3.7 stars.

STARTED-FINISHED
12/15/23-1/21/24… (més)

review of
Mark Abley's Spoken Here - Travels Among Threatened Languages
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - April 16-21, 2017

Skip this, READ THE full-length review: "Unfortunately, no longer spoken here": https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/548094-unfortunately-no-longer-spoken-here?...

This is the 2nd bk I've read on this subject. The 1st one was Daniel Nettle & Suzanne Romaine's Vanishing Voices - The Extinction of the World's Languages (You can read my full review of that here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/524556-biolinguistic-diversity?chapter=1 ). I gave Vanishing Voices a 5 star review, the maximum here, but sd that it deserved an "11". At 1st, while I was reading this one, I was thinking it doesn't quite deserve as high praise but, WTF, I'm still giving it a "5" &, yes, it's a fantastic, important bk. Kudos to the author, he did a magnificent job. I'm deeply impressed. I hope hope hope hope hope more people read this bk & others like it. Really. Please.

I've been researching endangered languages for an 'opera' that I'm (d) composing called Endangered Languages, Endangered Cultures, Endangered Ideas & I'll never even begin to do justice to the subject - esp considering that the opera is so experimental that its relevance to the subject at hand might not even be obvious to appreciators of such things. No matter. That's why I read this bk. This review will be excerpted from for the libretto.

"A minority language always depends on popular will. It dies as its voices fade in the midst of PalmPilots, cell phones, and Walkmans. It dies as its remaining speakers find they have less and less to talk about.

"The price of that loss is beyond estimation. We have grown used to giving cultural artifacts a dollar figure: so many thousand for a Yeats manuscript, so many million for a Ming porcelain. But a language is more than any artifact. You can't slap a price tag on a language, no matter how small and obscure, any more than you can pin down the financial value of an ivory-billed woodpecker or a bill of rights. Mati Ke lacks the ever burgeoning scientific terminology of English and Japanese, nor does it enjoy a written language. But like all other human languages, it is a full and rich expression of a way of life, a culture, an identity. Whether or not it ever makes sense to use the term "primitive society," the phrase "primitive language" is an absurdity." - pp 4-5

A previous owner of this bk had pencilled in the margins next to the above-quoted: "rather poetic, don't you think?". I've been saying for a long time, maybe decades, that I think that endangered languages are being pushed out by technical ones & that the endangered languages are more poetic. These days I think it's more accurate to say that the endangered ones are more metaphorically sensitive to the environment in wch they're spoken.

"But a CD-ROM of an extinct language bears an uneasy resemblance to a stuffed dodo." - p 6

I found that a particularly interesting comparison insofar as there is no such thing as a "stuffed dodo", they're all composites made from other bird parts & artistry, no dodo was ever preserved. Did Abley know this when he wrote that? B/c, if he did, that makes the comparison even more apt.

"In Oklahoma, for example, I spent some time among the few remaining speakers of the Yuchi language. Yuchi is what linguists call an isolate: it bears a clear relation to no other living tongue. I wanted to discover what knowledge and understanding may die with Yuchi if it does indeed disappear." - pp 7-8

Exactly. As I later agree w/ the author as I read deeper in this bk, I prefer the Whorfian position that each language helps produce a distinct world-view - as opposed to a Chomskian position that no language can be that distinct from another b/c of inherent shared traits between all languages.

"Chomsky and his followers assert that all human languages depend on a generative grammar (or GG) that underlies the bewildering twists and wriggles words make on the surface of speech."

[..]

"Emphasizing the shared properties intrinsic to every language, they refuse to see any merit in the "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis," which influenced many scholars from the 1930s through the 1950s. As set out by Benjamin Lee Whorf (a brilliant amateur linguist, whose lack of a doctorate has often been held against him) and his great mentor Edward Sapir, the hypothesis suggests that the language a person speaks determines the way that person thinks." - pp 45-46

Whorf's key point is that conceptual content can't always be easily and exactly interchanged among languages: what is said and how it is said interact in complex ways." - p 47

""How," Devitt and Sterelny ask, "Could anything a person does to his experience — how could any of his modes of representation — affect stones, trees, cats and stars?"" - pp 47-48

The representation of cats as companions rather than as food might affect them, eh?!

"Let's return to the extraordinarily limited range of nouns by which Devitt and Sterelny symbolize "the world." They single out stones, trees, cats, and stars as emblematic of items that no mode of human representation can possibly affect, Is this as accurate as it is obvious? When you look at the words more closely, the self-evident truth of the proposition begins to blur.

"To begin with, there's a little ambiguity in their meaning. Our collective experience has a direct impact on stars like Madonna, cats like Wynton Marsalis, and Stones like Mick Jagger. But a broader, subtler answer is this: we signal our attitude to things in the world — cats, for example — by the way we talk about them. "The cat that spent the night in the rain" may have less of a claim on our affections than "the cat who spent the night in the rain." "Who is that cat in your arms?" suggests something different from "What is that cat in your arms?" (not to mention what is that cat doing in your arms?"). Language implies feeling. Feeling, one way or another, inspires action.

"Leave the confines of English behind, and the waters muddy even further. With the aid of the Concise Oxford Turkish Dictionary, I decided to see how those four nouns are expressed in a language far removed from the Indo-European family to which English belongs. Turkish is the largest member of the Altaic family; thousands of years, perhaps tens of thousands, have gone by since our remote ancestors (somewhere in central Asia, presumably) spoke the same words. In Turkish, I discovered, "cat" is kedi. But kedi-balugi, far from being a "catfish" as the literally translated compound says, is what we call a "lesser spotted dogfish." A kedi, unlike a cat, is involved in phrases meaning "to go bankrupt," "to cause bad blood," and "to look at with intense longing." A "stone" is a tas, most of the time. But a stone in the kidneys or gallbladder is kum hastaligi — in which case it indisputably affects your personal experience. And a çekirdek is also a stone, one you might unearth in a plum or an olive. Still, a Turkish stone would generally be called a tas. But a tas, I regret to say, is not always a stone. Sometimes it's what we call a chess piece. At other moments it's an allusion or an innuendo.

"Are stars — the heavenly variety, I mean — any simpler? Alas, no. A Turkish star can be a yildiz or a baht, and both are tied up in human lives. Baht can signify "good luck" or "destiny." Yildiz also implies deestiny, but it has the extra sense of "pole star" or "north." Finally we arrive at trees. There are several Turkish options. But the likeliest word, listed first on the page, is agaç. Troublee is, agaç also means "wood" or "timber." And surely the fate of trees can be profoundly affected by whether we think of them — in the mind's eye, in the same breath, always — as timber. (Consider the difference between the phrases "I like cows" and "I like beef.") English enforces a distinction between the living organism of a tree and the useful material that organism provides. Turkish does not.

"Perhaps, then, the inexhaustible, inviting world does show evidence of being constructed, to a significant degree, out of our linguistic experience." - pp 49-50

Ordinarily, I wdn't quote so much at one time. However, I think that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a deeply significant one that's worth defending at length. Neither Chomsky nor Sapir-Whorf is in favor of seeing languages & their speakers become extinct - but when one is of the opinion that entire world-views are at stake that seems to dramatically up the ante to me.

"Above all, I wanted to test my own hunch that the looming extinction of so many languages marks a decisive moment in human history — a turning away from vocal diversity in favor of what optimists see as a global soul and others as a soulless monoculture." - p 8

Count me as among the latter. Even among my younger anarchist friends I see a more or less unquestioning preference for Hollywood spectacles & their imitations over anything created from a more independent mass-media-questioning position. B/c of this monoculture I feel like the information in my head is of little or no interest to almost anyone anymore. Why do they 'need' it? There's always the latest app, the latest tv show, the latest same-old same-old sports spectacle. & I'm in a place that 'benefits' from the spoils of this monoculture. Yuk.

"What will we lose if our abundance of languages shrinks to a fraction of what now survives? A speaker of English or Chinese might answer differently from a speaker of Mati Ke. The simplest response, perhaps, is this: we will lose languages that are astonishingly unlike any widespread tongue. Languages employ sounds and organize the mental world in ways that are natural to their speakers but can seem downright weird to other people. Nootka, one of the languages of Vancouver Island, is a case in point. As the linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf once noted, to express the idea "He invites people to a feast" Nootka requires but a single word: tl'imshya'isita'itlma. Literally, "Boiling result eating those go to get somebody." Not quite so literally, "He, or somebody, goes to get eaters of cooked food." The Nootka would alter their speech — adding hissing noises or extra consonants for effect — when they were talking to or about children, fat people, short people, left-handed people, circumcised males, lame and hunchbacked people, greedy people (also ravens), and people with eye defects." - pp 8-9

Now, maybe, just maybe, somebody was pulling somebody's leg here. If they were, they had a great sense of humor. Is there just one word in English to express inviting people to dinner? Not that I know of. Maybe the Nootka-speaking culture is more sociable in that way. That's important.

"Guugu Yimidhirr, the source of "kangaroo," may still have a dozen or two speakers. But the languages that first told of koalas and kookaburras are no more." - p 15

What if linguists were able to take a closer look at the etymologies of such words? There might be stories there giving substantial insight. I think of things like: "The Trukese name for the night of the full moon is bonung aro, meaning "night of laying eggs." - p 74 (Vanishing Voices) In other words, a name that might seem fanciful or mystical might actually refer to specific biological knowledge.

The thing is, I'm one of those people who prefers that all knowledge be preserved but that's a pretty tall order, eh? It's probably too much for even the collective human mind to endure. Hence, some knowledge is lost, over & over, & human 'progress' is dubious.

Spoken Here was published in 2003. In it, Abley mentions that the "latest edition of Ethnologue, a directory of the world's languages, lists 417 as "nearly extinct." Of these, 138 are in Australia: a third of the total." (p 16) I have the 15th edition of the Ethnologue (2005), having been exposed to it by reading Vanishing Voices, & I can happily attest that it's what cliché language might call an 'invaluable resource'. What I didn't glean from reading Vanishing Voices is that the Ethnologue is a religious product:

"The Derbyshires' work in Brazil had been paid for by a controversial organization called SIL International — formerly the Summer Institute of Linguistics. Based in Dallas, Texas, SIL is among the largest employer of linguists in the field — linguists, that is, who actually study the world's languages rather than engaging in arcane analysis of the structural underpinnings of speech. Every few years SIL publishes an updated version of Ethnologue, an invaluable catalogue of each of the world's languages along with its dialects, its family relationships, an estimate of its speakers' numbers, and the principle countries where they live. The institute has long done terrific work. Yet its motives are open to question. SIL is part of the Wycliffe Bible network — a group of Protestant missionary societies, drawing their inspiration from a verse in Matthew and a few more in Revelation: "After this I beheld, and lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands; And cried with a loud voice . . ." Christian praise must be uttered in every human language — or so goes one interpretation of the text — for only then can the world come to an end.

"You could say, in brief, that SIL is in the business of saving languages so that they will all disappear." - pp 237-238

"For a critical view of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (to use its old name), see David Stoll's Fishers of Men or Founders of Empire? The Wycliffe Bible Translators in Latin America (London: Zed Press and Cultural Survivial, 1982). SIL's own Web site gives a much more secular view of the organization than does www.wycliffe.org. In July 2002 the Wycliffe site said: "Pray for the SIL training sessions going on in North Dakota and Oregon. Pray the God will enable each student to learn the basics of linguistic analysis. Pray too that God will burden the students' hearts for Bible translation."" - p 295

Oh, well, at least there're some protestants out there as fanatical as the Jesuits. Having been raised in a Christinane household, the woman who introduced my mom & stepdad was a missionary. I remember her telling a story once about walking some steps in Brazil when she came across some sort of native religious ceremony, perhaps the sacrifice of a chicken (why do chickens always get such a bad deal?). The missionary was horrified b/c, after all, Christians had made sure such religions were made illegal. How dare the people of the country she & her ilk were invading practice their own religion?!

"The location of a language, from an Aboriginal perspective, was decided in the Dreamtime. But the location of Wadeye — now the largest Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory — was selected by Father Richard Docherty, a missionary who founded the place in the 1930s and christened it Port Keats."

[..]

"Murrinh-Patha became a lingua franca." - p 18

"The recurrent isolation has helped keep Murrinh-Patha strong. For this is one of the very few traditional languages in Australia whose speakers have increased in number over the past generation. Lately it has spread beyond Wadeye to neighboring areas.

"Simplicity is not a reason for the language's success. Some of its complexities seem mind-numbing — unless you're willing to take the plunge and call them mind-expanding. In its pronoun system, where English slices the world into singular and plural, Murrinh-Patha has four categories: singular, dual (with forms that vary for two males, two females, and siblings), paucal (meaning three to about fifteen people, and again using different terms for males, females, and siblings), and plural (more than fifteen people). Each of these categories, moreover, has separate words for the first person ("we two males," for example), the second person ("you two males"), and the third person ("those two males"). "How are you?" we say in English, no matter how many people we're addressing and who they happen to be. Murrinh-Patha is a lot more precise. For "you," it compels a choice among nhinhi, nankunitha, nankungitha, nanku, nankuneme, nankungime, and nanki." - pp 18-19

& that's the lingua franca! I wonder if people for whom Murrinh-Patha is a 2nd language (or 3rd, etc) frequently make mistakes like referring to a hetero-couple as '2 sisters'. I can imagine a plethora of giggle-potential. I like imagining whole long stories just based around differentiating. & what about more-than-15 being plural? Why 15? Is 15 a traditional family gathering & most groupings beyond that involving more than family? Let's say 4 grandparents, 2 parents, 2 uncles, 2 aunts, 3 of the 3rd generation & 2 babies? At any rate, there must be a perceived need for such specificity that most English-speakers don't feel. That, in itself, is interesting.

But then, alas, we get back to human nature at its most depressing, or, at least, the 'human nature' of conquering peoples.

""Yabbering" and "jabbering" are interesting words. They show up all over the English-speaking world whenever a speaker feels like sneering at animals or a minority people. Look up "jabber" in the Oxford English Dictionary, and you'll find quotations in which the term applies to monkeys, Flemish servants, seabirds, and Jews. It often betrays contempt, the dictionary observes, for "the speaking of a language which is unintelligible to the hearer."" - p 21

Bringing us back to such derogatory terms as "subhuman" & "savage". Ignorance covers its tracks by degrading what it's ignorant about - if someone doesn't speak a language then that language isn't worth speaking, it's just 'jabber'. Yuk.

"many speakers of Yolngu and other Aboriginal languages have become convinced of the existence of a "secret English" — a version of English that has special, even sacred force."

[..]

"This is a fantasy, of course. Or is it? Words do have power. Across Australia, many of the worst massacres of Aborigines took place after books and magazines had appeared calling them "a species . . . of tailless monkey," "the lowest race of savages in the known world," - p 41

&, indeed, this is very important to understand: mass media spreads certain perceptions, it defines people & ideas for the masses, it propagandizes for or against - & this can have very serious consequences. Take, eg, Donald Trump's Press Secretary Sean Spicer's recent statement that Adolph Hitler, who fatally gassed millions of citizens of his own country & of the countries that Germany had invaded, hadn't used chemical weapons against his own people: "You had someone as despicable as Hitler who didn't even sink to using chemical; weapons." ( https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/11/sean-spicer-hitler-chemical-weap... )

Regardless of whether Spicer is really as much of an imbecile as he seems, the effect of his statement is to reinforce holocaust denial versions of history. Such denial is a way of covering over genocide & paving the way for a 'good nazi' myth that appeals to Trump's nazi & white supremacist supporters. BEWARE.… (més)

For many years Mark Abley had a column about words in the Montreal Gazette, in which he addressed pet peeves, grammar police, the changing nature of the meanings of specific words in English and so on. This book expands on those columns, with chapters dealing with idioms about time, body parts, fear, animals and many other ways in which words and phrases are used to describe deeper feelings and attitudes. In addition to the text of each chapter, he includes seven sets of sidebars that are marked with funny illustrations: “combing the giraffe” (foreign idioms); “donkey’s hind leg” (outdated idioms); “household names” (idioms from names); “it is written” (biblical idioms); “merchant of words” (idioms from Shakespeare); “spoonfuls of sugar” (language trivia); and “tomatoes on your eyes” (nonsense idioms). There’s something quite nice about ending the year with a trivia book that one can dip in and out of at leisure, especially one that is both as whimsical and thought-provoking as this book is; loads of fun and highly recommended!… (més)

If you perk up your ears for a bit, you will notice that English is not the language it once was. Odd terms, new phrases, and foreign invasions are changing English from the inside out. The explosion of the Internet and small-scale news have given localisms a chance to flourish on a global scale. It took the word “teenager” roughly sixty years to become mainstream, but now noob and lol are commonplace after only a decade of use. Mark Abley’s The Prodigal Tongue traces the historical journey of the English and project many possible changes the language could take.

Right now, English and its many variations are swarming around world, threatening to become the universal language. It’s already the official language of pilots, the World Bank, and even OPEC. But this comes at a cost to the language itself. In its ambition to become the lingua franca of the world, the world affects it in many small and large ways. Each new country that takes on English changes it to suit their purposes, and Abley shows us how this affects both the speakers and speech. Singapore English is an odd mish-mash of local dialects and general English terms. Japanese English, while sometime mocked when egregious mistranslations occur, is creating a row because it is displacing traditional kanji writing. The Spanglish of Southern California is leading to new debates about whether the United States should decree English as the official language.

Abley’s gusto for new words and Englishes is almost childlike and Zen at the same time. He is not one of those linguists who cry out for purity and put down neologisms. Every time he sees a new construction, it is a chance to investigate in what ways the language is changing and what that means on a larger scale. If you are a native English speaker, there are times when you may get a little defensive when Abley proposes that all English variations are both valid and good, but his overall feeling is that each new English offers a way for use to communicate with those we haven’t been able to before. And that can’t be too bad of a thing. A very engaging read.… (més)