May 27, 2004 - Carnival Jargon

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Todd Robbins and friends." src="http://www.voanews.com/specialenglish/Wordmaster/Archive/images/carnivalknowledge.com_todd_robbins_27may04_eng-wm.jpg" width="148" border="0" height="150" hspace="0">

Todd Robbins and friends.

Broadcast: May 27, 2004

Memorial Day weekend is almost here, and with it, the unofficial start of America's summer season. Traditionally, Memorial Day is the busiest day in the year for traveling carnivals with their trained animals, games of chance and sideshow acts, complete with fire-eaters, sword-swallowers and other colorful, even freakish performers.

The number of working sideshows has diminished since the advent of television and the amusement park. And fewer "carnies" are working the crowds. But you'll still find a traditional sideshow at New York's Coney Island, where some of the special jargon of the carnie is still spoken and understood. So step right up folks, as Todd Robbins, Coney Island's sideshow impresario takes Wordmaster guest host Adam Phillips on a little tour.

PHILLIPS: To most Americans, that is the sound of a carousel or "merry-go-round." But to carnival and circus workers, what you're hearing is a "jenny" or "flying jenny" if the wooden horses go up and down.

Sideshow entertainer and historian Todd Robbins, says that's just one example of the special vocabulary of the carnival. These traveling shows would roll into town, set up for a day or two, even perhaps a week or two, then pull up stakes and move on to the next stop.

ROBBINS: "And because of this nomadic quality, they have a tendency to rely upon themselves and not look to the communities for much other than basic supplies. Because of that, there's a certain jargon that has developed."

Mr. Robbins freely concedes that, over the years, certain "carnies" as carnival folks are often called developed a certain shady reputation as well. He points to the midway, the section of the carnival where food stands and games are set up and where the customers, called "marks," wander around distracted by all the activity.

ROBBINS: "The term 'MARK' comes from the tradition of having someone putting a little mark on a person's back with a little piece of chalk to show, for instance, that they were at a game or they were at a food stand and took out their wallet, and they got what is known as a 'peek at the poke' which means that saw what they had in the wallet and there was a lot of money there. So they put a little mark on the person's shoulder so as when they were going along the games people would be really working to get them in to get to take their money."

Today, carnivals are part of a regulated industry -- and sideshows, when they exist at all, are tame affairs. However, Todd Robbins says that 40 or 50 years ago carnivals provided an all-day exotic adventure for entire communities.

ROBBINS: "They would come out and watch them put up the tent and set up the whole show. They'd wander around and they'd see them watering and exercising the animals. And then an hour before the show would start, they'd open the sideshow right next to the entrance and say, 'the show is so big on the inside; we cannot put it in the main tent. We have a whole separate show featuring strange and unusual, bizarre and beautiful people -- see it now.'"

Todd Robbins lapses easily into the cadence of an old time "barker," the term non-carnival people call the man standing outside the tent trying to lure customers inside.

ROBBINS: "Traditionally, the barker is known as the 'outside talker.' And a 'barker' in a carnival is actually a guard dog. So if you ask where the barker is, they'll say 'Come here, king! Come on over here, boy!'"

While admission to the traditional sideshow was often very cheap, once inside, there was ample opportunity to, as Mr. Robbins puts it, "relieve oneself of more money." That's what "dings are for.

ROBBINS: "It would be an additional charge to see various things. Or there would be souvenirs at the end of various acts. The magic act might sell you a magic trick. The giant might sell you a giant's finger ring. The dwarf or midget in the show might sell you a miniature bible. We are not sure why it's called the ding, but I think it is the sound of a cash register ringing up a sale."

Most sideshows contained ten acts, with an obligatory extra act added on.

ROBBINS: "At the end, there was something called a 'blowoff,' and it was the last act and usually something very strong. There was a term called 'working strong' which meant there was something shocking and startling about it. Like in our show we have a girl who turns into a gorilla right before your eyes. It was often what is known as a 'half and half' which would be a half-man, half-woman who would talk about their condition and then you'd step behind the curtain into the annex which was the curtained-off area where the blowoff was performed, and sometimes sell you little postcards showing themselves in the nude."

It was a sight that kept almost everyone in the audience either amazed or fooled and the carnies, in the money. For more about sideshows and sideshow jargon, visit Todd Robbins' website at Carnivalknowledge that's c-a-r-n-i-v-a-l-k-n-o-w-l-e-d-g-e dot com and you're on your own.

For Wordmaster, this is Adam Phillips reporting from Coney Island New York.

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May 20, 2004 - Lida Baker: Voiced and Voiceless Sounds in English

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Broadcast on COAST TO COAST: May 20, 2004

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster -- helping English learners find their voice.

RS: It's time for our monthly visit with English teacher Lida Baker in Los Angeles. Today she has advice about how to master sounds that are often a source of confusion for students learning English.

AA: In linguistic jargon they're called voiced and voiceless sounds.

BAKER: "When we talk about voiced and voiceless sounds, what we're talking about primarily are consonant pairs in English where you have two sounds that are identical, except that one has vibration in the throat and the other doesn't."

AA: "Like park and bark."

BAKER: "Park and bark. Peach and beach. Pears and bears. Arabic speakers, for the most part -- generally the Arabic language does not have a 'phh' sound, the p, at the beginnings of words. So it is hard for an Arabic student to pronounce a word like 'pears.' So if an Arabic speaker says 'there are bears in the garden,' he might think that he's referring to a fruit. But what an English speaker hears is that there is a big scary animal.

"If a German speaker says 'I'm choking,' the German speaker might mean that he is, in fact, joking. But Germans are not able, for the most part again, to pronounce a 'j' sound at the beginning of words, because the German language just doesn't have that. So what they'll do is substitute the 'ch' at the beginning of the word. And then you have the comprehension difficulty. Is he saying 'I'm choking' or 'I'm joking,' see? [laughter] So this could potentially lead to some unintended consequences."

RS: "So what do you do? You first recognize that you've got a problem or there's an issue?"

BAKER: "Well, you can't take that step for granted. The first step, in fact, is consciousness raising, where when you have people learning English, it's important to make them aware of the sound differences between their language and the English language. They don't know that there is a problem -- that, you know, English has two sounds where their language has only one sound. So the first step would be to simply make them aware of these differences."

RS: "They can actually feel it, right?"

BAKER: "That's right. You can feel it. The way to do is -- and all the people in our listening audience should play along with me now -- open up your hand and put it on your throat, and say 'bhh.'"

RS & AA: "Bhh."

BAKER: "Now what do you feel in your throat?"

AA: "Vibration."

BAKER: "Vibration. You feel something moving. You know what that is? That's your vocal cords, and there are two vocal cords, and they actually vibrate like the strings on a violin or a guitar. Now, in contrast to that, say 'phh' -- "

AA: "Pah."

BAKER: "Now don't say 'pah.' Because of the vowel. You see, all vowels are voiced. So just say 'phh.'"

AA: "Yeah, no vibration."

BAKER: "No vibration."

RS: "Nothing there."

BAKER: "Or here are some other voiceless sounds: ssssss."

RS & AA: "Ssssss."

BAKER: "No vibration, right?"

AA: "No."

RS: "Nothing."

BAKER: "Now say 'muh.'"

RS: "Oh, there you can feel it."

BAKER: "You can feel it. So it's very easy to help students to distinguish between voiced and voiceless sounds just by having them do this physical action of putting their hand on their throat. And you can practice starting with minimal pairs like peach/beach, jeep/cheap for German speakers, or leaf/leave. Speakers of many languages have difficulty with the voiced/voiceless pair of 'f' and 'v,' especially at the ends of words, OK?

"And then you start expanding into phrases and finally into sentences. And you can do this in a very controlled way, in the form of drills. But eventually what you want to do is give students more open and communicative contexts in which some of these minimal pairs might arise."

RS: "You can feel the difference. But can you hear the difference?"

BAKER: "After this consciousness-raising phase, where students become aware of the existence of voiced and voiceless pairs, the next step would be to do exercises where we're asking them to hear the differences. So one of my favorite activities is, I'll say something like 'there are pears in the garden.' And what I'll instruct them to do is to hold up one finger if they hear the voiceless -- the 'phh' -- and hold up two fingers if they hear the voiced, or 'bhh.' It's a wonderful activity, because the students are getting feedback from one another, instead of the teacher having to say 'that's right/that's wrong.'"

AA: Lida Baker writes textbooks for English learners and teaches in the American Language Center at the University of California, Los Angeles.

RS: You can find her previous segments on our Web site, voanews.com/wordmaster. And our e-mail address is word@voanews.com. With Avi Arditti, I'm Rosanne Skirble.

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May 13, 2004 - 'Your Own Words' by Barbara Wallraff

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Broadcast on COAST TO COAST: May 13, 2004

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster -- we talk to language columnist and author Barbara Wallraff about her new book. It's called "Your Own Words." In it, she explains, quote, "how to outsmart the reference books and be your own language expert."

And Barbara Wallraff says one of the best ways to do that is with an Internet search engine like ...

WALLRAFF: "Google in particular -- and some of the other ones are starting to have this too -- but Google in particular has a feature called Google News. Everything on Google News is some kind of edited medium. It might be a Web site for a newspaper with the stories from the newspaper. Or a television Web site. Thousands of edited media Web sites are searchable for even little words or phrases.

"So if you're trying to decide whether -- if you're trying to figure out what the word 'phishing' spelled with a p-h at the beginning means, that's one of the examples of a new term that you can go look on Google News and you'll find a bunch of newspaper articles that will mention phishing and, because it's a new term, will tell you what it means."

AA: "And please explain it."

WALLRAFF: "Phishing is a form of e-mail scam. People will send an e-mail that pretends to be from something like PayPal or eBay or your bank, and it'll try to look official and it'll say 'oh sorry, we lost your credit card information and your social security number. Could you just give it to us again?'"

RS: "Who sets the standards, though? How do you know what you're getting is correct?"

WALLRAFF: "Well, this Internet method of looking things up that I'm talking about is particularly good for new words, because when I turned in the manuscript of my book, which was right around the beginning of the year, 'phishing' every time you saw it was glossed. Language people call it glossing when the word is defined. When you say phishing, you say 'comma, an e-mail scam that ... ' so on and so forth. Every time you saw phishing last year, it was glossed.

"Now if you go look on Google News, and it gives you just the last month's worth of citations, I think the majority of citations -- or at least when I last looked the majority of citations were not glossed. So that's an interesting fact, that it's becoming well enough known that people are beginning to be comfortable using that word, expecting people they say it to to know what they mean.

"If all the citations that you see are from very specialized publications, that tells you something. That tells you it's not in the mainstream. There was a business expression a few years ago: 'put the moose on the table.' And somebody wrote me and said, what in the heck does that mean. I would have no idea how to find out what 'put the moose on the table' meant if it weren't for the Internet.

"You need to put quotation marks around a phrase. Otherwise you'll get all of the articles that contain 'put' somewhere in them and 'table' and 'moose' someplace in the article. But when I called that up, I got a magazine article explaining that a man whose name I now forget had been the CEO [chief executive officer] of a company, and it was his way of saying, let's talk about some uncomfortable truth that we're not acknowledging."

RS: "What would you hope readers to your book take away from it."

WALLRAFF: "A lot of people think what's in their head about language is right, and they haven't necessarily examined that in depth. If you begin to study, if you begin to think 'how do I know that, do I really know that?' you may find that there are things you don't know. But you'll also find you can know the answers to just about any question. And often -- more often than you'd like -- the answer is 'it depends.' Or 'that's up to you, here's the range of respectable opinion.' But you don't want to be somebody saying 'well, it's got to be done this way, this word is wrong, wrong, wrong,' when it's not."

AA: Barbara Wallraff writes a language column in the Atlantic Monthly magazine, and she's just written a book called "Your Own Words." That's Wordmaster for this week. Our e-mail address is word@voanews.com. And you can find all of our segments archived at voanews.com/wordmaster. With Rosanne Skirble, I'm Avi Arditti.

MUSIC: "Free"/Phish

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THE MAKING OF A NATION #61 - Andrew Jackson, Part 5

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Broadcast: May 6, 2004

(MUSIC)

VOICE ONE:

THE MAKING OF A NATION -- a program in Special English.

(MUSIC)

As we reported last week, the question of continuing the Bank of the United States arose as one of the serious issues facing the national election of eighteen-thirty-two. The bank's head, Nicholas Biddle, had become as powerful as the president of the United States. He refused to recognize that the government had the right to interfere in any way with the bank's business.

President Jackson also understood the power of the Bank of the United States. He did not believe the bank should continue. He opposed giving it a new charter. He proposed that a new national bank be formed as part of the Treasury Department. Jackson said the present Bank of the United States was dangerous to the liberty of Americans. He said the bank could build up, or pull down, political parties through loans to politicians. He said the bank always would support those who supported it.

VOICE TWO:

In the election year of eighteen-thirty-two, the bank still had four years left to continue. Its charter would not end until eighteen-thirty-six. Jackson had been urging Congress to act early, so that the bank could -- if its charter were rejected -- close its business slowly over several years. This would prevent serious economic problems for the country. Many of Jackson's advisers believed he should say nothing about the bank until after the election. They feared he might lose the votes of some supporters of the bank. Biddle felt that this might be the best time to get a charter.

Henry Clay, the presidential candidate of the National Republicans, helped biddle to make this decision. Senator Clay, however, was not thinking of the bank when he gave his advice. Clay needed an issue to campaign on. Most of the people of the country approved of Jackson's programs. Clay could not get votes by opposing successful programs. But, he was sure that the issue of the bank could get him some votes.

VOICE ONE:

The campaign for a new charter was led by the most powerful men in each house of Congress. In the Senate, the bank's supporters included Senator Clay and Daniel Webster. Former President John Quincy Adams -- now a congressman -- led the bank's struggle in the house. The chief opponent to the bank was Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. "I object to the renewal of the charter," he told the Senate, "because the bank is too great and powerful to be permitted in a government of free and equal laws. I also object because the bank makes the rich richer, and the poor poorer."

VOICE TWO:

In the house, Representative Augustin Clayton of Georgia proposed an investigation of the bank. In a speech written by Senator Benton, Clayton charged that the bank had violated its charter a number of times. The bank's supporters were afraid to vote down the proposed investigation. It would be almost the same thing as saying that the charges were true. The investigation was approved. And a special committee was given six weeks to study the charges against the bank.

Four members of the seven-man committee were opponents of the bank. Three, including John Quincy Adams, were friendly. As expected, opponents of the bank found the charges to be true. And the bank's supporters found them all to be false. The majority report told of easy loans made to congressmen and newspapermen. It said a New York newspaper that had opposed the bank began supporting it after receiving a secret fifteen-thousand-dollar loan.

VOICE ONE:

The investigation did not really change the votes of any of the congressmen. Many votes had been bought by the bank. Attorney General Roger Taney told of one example of this. Taney opposed the bank. And he rode to work one morning with a congressman who also opposed it. The congressman asked Taney for help on a speech he planned to make against the bank. Taney was surprised later to find that this same congressman had voted to give the bank its new charter. The congressman told Taney that the bank had made him a loan of twenty-thousand dollars.

VOICE TWO:

The Senate finally voted on the bank's new charter. The vote was twenty-eight, for, and twenty, against. The house voted three weeks later. It approved the charter, one-hundred-seven to eighty-five. The bill was sent to the White House. President Jackson called a cabinet meeting. Two cabinet members, McLane and Livingston, agreed that the bill should be vetoed. But they urged Jackson to reject the bank charter in such a way that a compromise might be worked out later.

Attorney General Taney, however, believed that the veto should be in the strongest possible language. He opposed any compromise that would continue the bank beyond eighteen-thirty-six. Jackson agreed with Taney. He asked the attorney general and two white house advisers to help him write the veto message. They worked on the message for three days.

VOICE ONE:

On July tenth, the veto was announced. And the message explaining it was sent to Congress. Jackson said he did not believe the bank's charter was constitutional. He said it was true that the Supreme Court had ruled that Congress had the right to charter a national bank. But he said he did not agree with the high court. And Jackson said the president -- in taking his oath of office -- swears to support the constitution as he understands it...not as it is understood by others. He said the president and the congress had the same duty as the court to decide if a bill was constitutional.

Jackson also spoke of the way the bank moved money from west to east. He said the bank was owned by a small group of rich men, mostly in the east. Some of the owners, he said, were foreigners. Much of the bank's business was done in the west. The money paid by westerners for loans went into the pockets of the eastern bankers. Jackson said this was wrong. Then the president spoke of his firm belief in the rights of the common man.

VOICE TWO:

"It is to be regretted," he said, "that the rich and powerful bend the acts of the government to their own purposes. Differences among men will always exist under every just government. Equality of ability, or education, or of wealth cannot be produced by human institutions. Every man has the equal right of protection under the laws. But when these laws are used to make the rich richer, and the powerful more powerful, then the more humble members of our society have a right to complain of injustice."

Jackson said he could not understand how the present owners of the bank could have any claim of special treatment from the government. He said the government should shower its favors -- as heaven does its rain -- on the high and low alike, on the rich and the poor equally.

VOICE ONE:

Henry Clay had made the bank bill the chief issue of the eighteen-thirty-two presidential election campaign. Andrew Jackson chose the words of his veto message for the same purpose -- to win votes in the coming election. His veto of the bank bill cost him the votes of men of money. But it brought him the votes of the common man: the farmer, the laborer, and industrial worker.

After his first two years as President, Andrew Jackson was not sure he wished to serve a second term. Jackson was not sure his health would permit him to complete a full eight years in the White House. But he wished to be a candidate again in eighteen-thirty-two to give the people a chance to show they approved of his programs. Jackson decided that he would campaign again for president. But if he won, he would resign after the first or second year...and leave the job to his vice president.

(MUSIC)

VOICE TWO:

You have been listening to the Special English program, THE MAKING OF A NATION. Your narrators were Maurice Joyce and Stewart Spencer. Our program was written by Frank Beardsley. THE MAKING OF A NATION can be heard Thursdays.

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May 6, 2004 - Easy English Times

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Broadcast on COAST TO COAST: May 6, 2004

AA: I'm Avi Arditti, and this week on Wordmaster -- English made easy. There's a newspaper in California called Easy English Times. It's written for English learners, and it started in 1996. I met the publisher, Betty Malmgren, and the editor, Lorraine Ruston, at the TESOL English teachers convention in California last month.

They were surprised that I'd heard of their small paper. They were even more surprised that someone mailed a copy to the VOA Special English office several years ago. The two women thought surely I was thinking of the fancier "News for You" newspaper featured at a booth nearby.

No, I wanted to talk to them about their newspaper, starting with Betty Malmgren.

MALMGREN: "Easy English Times was really started on a kitchen table in Napa as means to produce information for people studying English as a second language and adult literacy projects. We wanted to do a newspaper format so that people could start with reading Easy English Times, and then graduate on to a real newspaper."

AA: "And what's your background?"

MALMGREN: "My personal background is in journalism and Lorraine is in English as a second language."

AA: "Let's talk about an average issue of Easy English Times. What will people find in it?"

MALMGREN: "Every month we try to include useful information, so we'll have information on health and fitness. We'll have people-at-work stories. We want things to be relevant to daily lives. We also do feature stories of things that are current interest. We try to encourage people to vote, for example. We have stories on immigration. We love to put student writing in the paper. That's the thing that we love the most. So we publish student writing, which comes in many different forms, from poetry to personal essays to stories."

AA: "Now Lorraine, you were an ESL teacher."

RUSTON: "I still am. I've been teaching ESL for over 30 years. And then I write the paper and I use it with my class. So I can see how it's working and what they like and what they don't like."

AA: "And how do you distribute the Easy English Times?"

MALMGREN: "Mainly in classroom sets, by mail. Lorraine also writes learning activities that we publish every month with the paper, so that teachers get an extra page of learning activities so that they can walk into a classroom and start teaching from the paper."

AA: "What's the circulation figures and how have they grown?"

MALMGREN: "It's almost five-thousand now. And it's growing slowly because we are the staff, so we have limited resources."

AA: "It's all volunteer, labor-of-love type work."

RUSTON: "Totally. We don't even pay ourselves."

AA: "I notice that on your banner, it mentions California. But you tell me you've got readers beyond California now."

MALMGREN: "We've gotten a lot of interest at this conference, but we do focus mainly on California. But we'll have to go home, I think, and talk about other possibilities."

RUSTON: "Ninety percent of our information is global, or United States. For instance, in March, April and May, we're running a big story about Lewis and Clark, in honor of the two-hundredth anniversary. So this is certainly United States history, and it will be helpful for citizenship learners, as well."

AA: "What is the subscription price?"

MALMGREN: "It's fifteen dollars for an individual subscription, or in a classroom set, it comes out to sixty cents a copy, or six dollars per student per year. But you can order the paper by the month and start and stop orders anytime."

AA: "What's your Web site?"

MALMGREN: "It's easyenglishtimes.com. Or our e-mail is easyenglish@aol.com."

AA: "In terms of editorials, taking an editorial stance, you're the publisher -- do you take positions on issues?"

MALMGREN: "We haven't really done that a lot. We try to do it in newspaper format, though, so we do have an editorial page. We just recently had a guest editorial that was more talking about spring. It was not political. And we do like letters to the editor, and it really encourages student writing. We want the students to feel ownership of the paper."

RUSTON: "When we had our primary election in California, the recall, we took a stand on that."

AA: "What position did you take?"

RUSTON: "We were against the recall at that time."

AA: "Against recalling Governor Gray Davis. Are you going to endorse a candidate for president in November?"

MALMGREN: "We've never done that, but we might consider it."

RUSTON: "Yeah, I think we will."

MALMGREN: "We like to bring up current topics and then put out information so that teachers will take suggestions for class discussions and then have a lively discussion in their own class, and we provide them with some background information. That's really more, we think, how the teacher uses the newspaper in the classroom, as a stepping stone to other discussions or writing assignments."

AA: "So you are journalists for the English learner community, I guess."

MALMGREN: "That's exactly it. And we really feel strongly that we want people to start with Easy English Times and then go on to read other newspapers."

AA: Betty Malmgren is the publisher of Easy English Times, and Lorraine Ruston is the editor. Again, their Web site is easyenglishtimes.com. And the e-mail address is easyenglish@aol.com.

Our e-mail here at Wordmaster is word@voanews.com. And we're on the Web at voanews.com/wordmaster. Rosanne Skirble is back with me next week. I'm Avi Arditti.

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