September 30, 2004 - Language of Broadway

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Broadway performers who will entertain Republican convention delegates have one last rehearsal VOA Photo - P. Wolfson" src="http://www.voanews.com/specialenglish/Wordmaster/Archive/images/voa_wolfson_gop_convention_broadway_150_eng_29aug04.jpg" width="150" border="0" height="150" hspace="0">

Broadway performers who will entertain Republican convention delegates have one last rehearsal VOA Photo - P. Wolfson

Broadcast on COAST TO COAST: September 30, 2004

It's autumn in New York -- time for an all-new razzle-dazzle season on Broadway, the undisputed capital of the American stage. For over one hundred years, audiences have been going to Broadway shows to be moved and entertained blissfully unaware of all the hard work going on backstage.

But as VOAs Adam Phillips reports in this edition of Wordmaster, backstage on Broadway is an entire world in itself complete with its own colorful -- and often highly dramatic -- vocabulary.

ADAM PHILLIPS: That's the music for "Tim and Scrooge," a new show that is scheduled to open soon in New York hopefully to thunderous applause. Before the curtain on "Tim and Scrooge" rises however, it's work-work-work for the cast and crew in Broadway rehearsal studios like this one.

(AMBIENT SOUND)

Jennifer Paulson-Lee, the show's choreographer and associate director, takes a few moments to teach me something about the special language of the theater.

JENNIFER PAULSON-LEE: "To get to a result, a product, a finished show that someone has paid money to go see, actors have to go through these rehearsals and develop the heart of their character. We call it 'the process.' It's their preparation from the minute you get the script in their hand to when you open. Everyone has their own process."

AP: But even before any actors say a line, a show's director and creative staff must develop a firm sense together for how the show will ultimately look and sound. Ms. Paulson Lee that that is a process in itself -- complete with its own jargon.

JENNIFER PAULSON-LEE: "You talk about the whole overall structure of the piece that has do with the concept and the story and the way in which you're going to tell the story: the 'arc' of the show. And that is where the 'high points' are [and] where the 'low points' are. We talk about when we stop for applause 'Are we are going to go for a button?'" A button is the final 'pose,' the final picture. 'Ta da!' Essentially that ends the 'number.' And the button is -- "

AP: "The number?"

JENNIFER PAULSON-LEE: "A number is a song. You have to button the number that sends everyone to rousing applause -- we hope! -- and then you 'break' the applause. The actor breaks the applause. That's a term we use when he steps in and continues the show. So he 'rides' the applause. There's another one [term]. And when it peaks, you break it with movement, or the actor starts to speak."

Ms. Paulson Lee says that an actor who overacts in search of attention or applause is said to be "chewing the scenery."

JENNIFER PAULSON-LEE: "Actors who chew the scenery are just either very loud or hysterical. They typically 'steal the show.' That means you steal it away from the leading actor who is supposed to be leading the scene."

AP: "You divert attention away, you mean?"

JENNIFER PAULSON-LEE: "Yes. That's a nice way of putting it. Stealing is the most appropriate way!"

The conversation in a scene onstage may seem spontaneous, but its pacing is carefully contrived by dividing a scene into "beats."

JENNIFER PAULSON-LEE: "And that is when one aspect of a scene has been in a completion. You've finished talking about a subject or you've changed the subject. And those turns in the conversation are called beats. And those are as determined by the actor and the director together, or the director."

In the theater as in everyday life, it's wise to expect the unexpected. Ms. Paulson-Lee says that when that happens in a good way ...

JENNIFER PAULSON-LEE: "It just becomes 'GOLD.' GOLD! That is the undefined magic that is what theater really is."

Ms. Paulson-Lee experienced that gold recently, during auditions for a stage production of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Scores of actresses had tried out for the role, but none seemed to be a good fit.

JENNIFER PAULSON-LEE: "So this girl walks into the audition. She had sparkly eyes, she is very shapely and all she did was smile. And we knew that was it! She was perfect. Just perfect! And we said 'That's it. She's gold.' Because she was gonna bring to our show the spark that you couldn't define. You had to just see it!"

Jennifer Paulson-Lee acknowledges that sometimes, theater critics fail to find any gold in a production, so they 'kill' it in their reviews.

JENNIFER PAULSON-LEE: "That means they use such language that tears apart the utter core of the show, which means that no one is going to want to buy a ticket for your show. They can 'pan' your show. Panning means bad, echh, don't waste your time.

"They can 'eat it up.' That means they love it.

"To sum it all up, you want to make sure you get a 'grand curtain call.' Which means the bows, when the actors come out and they take their bows and you get an ovation, which hopefully they know about. A 'standing ovation,' when everyone's done a brilliant job, you stand up, you give the rousing applause and you don't stop. You make them [the actors] come back."

AP: "I can see that even remembering it you just get pleasure from it."

JENNIFER PAULSON-LEE: "Oh I love it. I just love it."

Jennifer Paulson-Lee is the choreographer and associate director of "Tim and Scrooge," one of many shows that are scheduled for the New York theater season just getting underway. Let's hope that everyone -- in theater jargon -- "breaks a leg," meaning, of course, we hope that they don't. For Wordmaster, this is Adam Phillips in New York.

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September 23, 2004 - Native American Influence on English

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Broadcast on COAST TO COAST: September 23, 2004

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: with the National Museum of the American Indian opening in Washington, we look at Native American influence on the English language.

RS: Linguist Marianne Mithun is author of the book "The Languages of Native North America." She's a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

AA: Professor Mithun says the Europeans who came to North America had to borrow native words to describe lots of things, including places.

MARIANNE MITHUN: "One of the first contacts the Europeans made when they came to the New World (involved) Jacques Cartier, who sailed up the St. Lawrence River and ran into some people and said 'where is this?' or 'where are we?' And they said something like 'ganada,' which is the Mohawk word now and the word in other related languages for a settlement or a town. And so they wrote it down and said 'we must be in Canada.' Ohio, that's another Iroquoian word, which means large river or large creek. And so it was the name of the river first and then became the name of the state. Kentucky is another one, which means prairie or meadow or garden."

RS: "So the people who came to this land, they didn't have names for places and they probably didn't have names for some of the plants (because) they didn't know what they were."

(VOA photo - R. Pentola)

MARIANNE MITHUN: "That's right. So some of those are things like squash and hickory -- these are Algonquian, so these are from the east -- hominy, persimmon, pecan."

RS: "Are there any idioms that may endure now that have gone through or ways of describing things that are not either places or animals or plants."

MARIANNE MITHUN: "That's tricky. I should say there are cultural things; the other kind of thing that gets borrowed a lot is, if you want a name for something that only the native people use, and so we have a lot of those -- like moccasin, for example. That's a regular word for shoe, but now it means a special kind of shoe. Things like powwow, tomahawk. Eskimo gives us things like kayak and mukluk and anorak."

AA: "And what's interesting is that I suppose in modern times now to use some of these terms, perhaps in jest or however, might actually be considered offensive to Native Americans."

MARIANNE MITHUN: "Absolutely. In fact, a very good example of that is squaw. That's a regular Alongquian word for woman."

RS: But Professor Mithun says the term squaw as used by Europeans took on different connotations over the centuries, so that now people often think of it as being derogatory.

AA: Marianne Mithun is not Native American herself, but she works with different native languages to help document them.

MARIANNE MITHUN: "A lot of people don't realize how many languages there were here and still are here. There were probably around 300 different languages in North America."

AA: "How many of those 300 languages still exist?"

MARIANNE MITHUN: "About 180 right now -- and I say about, because we're losing them all the time. It's not how many speakers you have, it's how old they are. So if all of your speakers are over 80, you can see how many years you might have left. Almost all of the languages in North America are endangered. There's only one (native) language in North America that isn't endangered, and that's Greenlandic. What this means is that either children are no longer learning them as a first language, which is the case for almost all of them, or fewer children are learning them every year.

"So we think of Navajo, for example, as being very healthy because there are more Navajo speakers than of all other North American languages combined. There are over 100,000 Navajo speakers. But in the early '90s most children came to school knowing Navajo as their first language. Now very few come to school with Navajo as their first language. So even Navajo, which seems to be the strongest outside of Greenlandic, is in danger.

"It's sort of obvious parents want to help their children get ahead, and they themselves had a hard time because they didn't speak English, so they want their children to speak English. And the problem is that people haven't realized that being bilingual can be a very powerful thing."

RS: Marianne Mithun is a linguistics professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of "The Languages of Native North America." Now, in case you're wondering, mukluks are animal-skin boots that Eskimos wear. And an anorak? It's a type of jacket with a hood.

AA: And that's all for us this week. Our e-mail address is word@voanews.com and you can find all of our segments at voanews.com/wordmaster. If you'd like to visit the new National Museum of the American Indian online, go to americanindian.si.edu. With Rosanne Skirble, I’m Avi Arditti.

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September 16, 2004 - 'Presidential Voices'

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Broadcast on COAST TO COAST: September 16, 2004

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: the voice of American presidents.

RS: Allan Metcalf of the American Dialect Society has just written a timely book. It's called "Presidential Voices: Speaking Styles from George Washington to George W. Bush."

AA: He listened to recordings, where he could. He got a sense of how the early presidents sounded by what people had to say about their speeches.

Allan Metcalf says in the late 1700s, George Washington – America’s first president – had an especially formal style.

ALLAN METCALF: "He wanted to prove that an ordinary citizen, an ordinary citizen of the enlightenment of a free country, would be as worthy and dignified as any of the crowned heads of Europe. For example, his inaugural address begins with, 'Among the vicissitudes incident to life no event could have filled me with greater anxieties than that of which the notification was transmitted by your order, and received on the fourteenth day of the present month.' And he goes on in that vein, and he was such an influence that most presidents since him have needed to be somewhat dignified and elevated.

"And even in the nineteenth century, the first six presidents were all rather aristocratic themselves. But then along came Andrew Jackson and then a number of other presidents who boasted of having been born in log cabins, common men, but nevertheless they, too, followed along in Washington's example."

RS: "What would it have been like to have listened to Washington?"

ALLAN METCALF: "Well, for one thing, you wouldn't have had to spend too much time. His false teeth were so painful that he rarely spoke for longer than ten minutes at a time. And they were painful because they had springs in them to keep his mouth open. So he had to exert pressure to keep his mouth closed."

RS: "Allan, have any words or phrases come into American English because of the president's speeches?"

ALLAN METCALF: "Some have. President Jefferson was noted for his innovations in vocabulary. He had words like Anglomania, electioneering, belittle -- he seems to be among the first to use that. I think the most impressive, though, the most creative of all the presidents, was Teddy Roosevelt. He was able to come up with terms like muckraker and even lunatic fringe. And bully pulpit -- he called the presidency a bully pulpit, meaning it was a wonderful place to give speeches and be listened to. He used the term bully all the time as a term of enthusiasm."

RS: "Say we wanted to run for president. What kind of advice would you give us in order to write a good speech."

ALLAN METCALF: "Well, all you have to do is go back to George Washington and then you go back to the other presidents who followed in Washington's footsteps, or mouthsteps or whatever, using the phrases that they used. And you'll find as you look at the different inaugural addresses that they are almost interchangeable. So in my book I came up with an all-purpose presidential inaugural address that you or anyone can use when you become president. And it begins with:

"'Fellow citizens' (which George Washington and his successors said) conscious of 'the magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which my country called me' (that's Washington) but knowing that 'the will of the people is the source, and the happiness of the people the end, of all legitimate government upon earth' (that's John Quincy Adams) I pledge my 'attachment to the Constitution of the United States, and a conscientious determination to support it' (that's John Adams).

"'The business of our nation goes forward' (said Ronald Reagan, and that's suitable in all occasions). 'The only thing we have to fear is fear itself' (said Franklin Roosevelt). 'Much time has passed since Jefferson arrived for his inauguration ... But the themes of this day he would know: our nation's grand story of courage and its simple dream of dignity' (said George W. Bush). So 'God bless you and may God bless America" (said Ronald Reagan and his successors).'"

RS: "That was Ronald Reagan?"

ALLAN METCALF: "Yes, he was the innovator for the 'God bless you, and may God bless America.'"

AA: "So before that, how did presidents end their speeches?"

ALLAN METCALF: "Oh that's a good question. I'll have to look it up. [laughter]"

RS: "It sounds like you had a lot of fun writing this book. Any surprises along the way?"

ALLAN METCALF: "The chief surprise was that the presidents didn't speak that well. But I also was surprised at how shy some of our presidents were about public speaking. Thomas Jefferson, such a great writer, declined to speak in public when the Declaration of Independence was being debated, the thing that he had written. He didn't say a word.

"I was surprised at how unimpressive Abraham Lincoln's first inaugural address was. His second was tremendous and his Gettysburg Address was great. But his first inaugural attempted to give a lawyer's argument against secession, which totally failed.

"And I was surprised that George W. Bush, who makes blunders, not only isn't bothered but in fact relishes them, and shortly after he was elected president, he gave a talk where he read aloud from the 'Book of Bushisms,' laughing at them just as much as anybody else."

AA: Allan Metcalf is executive secretary of the American Dialect Society and an English professor at MacMurray College in Illinois. His newest book is called "Presidential Voices: Speaking Styles from George Washington to George W. Bush."

RS: And that's all for this week. Word@voanews.com is our e-mail address. And our Web site is voanews.com/wordmaster. With Avi Arditti, I'm Rosanne Skirble.

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September 9, 2004 - Epigram Writer

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Ashleigh Brilliant

Broadcast on COAST TO COAST: September 9, 2004

DAVE ARLINGTON: Every Thursday we bring you another report in our Wordmaster series, looking at American English. Avi Arditti and Rosanne Skirble will be back next week. In their place, we meet a man who puts just a few words together in unusual ways. As VOA's Mike O'Sullivan reports from Los Angeles, he has earned a living for more than three decades by getting his entertaining little phrases printed in newspapers and books and on postcards and T-shirts.

MIKE O'SULLIVAN: Ashleigh Brilliant writes epigrams, which he explains are short, pithy sayings.

ASHLEIGH BRILLIANT: "Traditionally, it's written to go onto something. That's where the 'epi' part comes from. 'Gram' means 'writing.' 'Epi' is 'upon.' So originally they were something to be written and put on a tree or on a rock. Nowadays, of course, they can go on a T-shirt or on a postcard, or anything. But it's the idea of a separate little piece of writing."

MO: He has imposed some additional rules on himself in writing his epigrams. They must be original and no longer than 17 words.

AB: "That's very short, even for an epigram. Mine must never have any rhyme of rhythm because my idea is to have them capable of being translated into other languages. Also, I try to say something meaningful, but also say it in a way that's entertaining."

MO: He is the author of nine books, made up of his epigrams, with illustrations.

AB: "The first one was called 'I May Not be Totally Perfect, But Parts of Me are Excellent.' Number two, 'I Have Abandoned My Search for Truth and am Now Looking for a Good Fantasy.' Next came, 'Appreciate Me Now and Avoid the Rush,' followed by, 'I Feel Much Better Now that I've Given Up Hope.'"

MO: Book number five was titled, "All I Want is a Warm Bed and a Kind Word, and Unlimited Power."

Ashleigh Brilliant was born in England, and says, yes, he was born with the name Brilliant. As a child, he moved to Canada with his parents, and came to California in 1956. After teaching high school briefly, he went on to finish a Ph.D. in American history at the University of California, Berkeley.

He taught college briefly, then spent two years on a cruise ship that sailed around the world offering college courses.

AB: "There was nowhere to go from that, so I had to find a new career. And it happened to be just about the time of the "summer of love" in San Francisco, 1967, so I became a sort of mock-hippie guru. And I had been writing these strange little things for quite a while and didn't know what to do with them, so this was my opportunity."

MO: He soon found that people would pay for his sayings printed on postcards. That was the start of a business. He syndicates his sayings in a newspaper column called "Pot-Shots," sells them on cards and in books, and licenses them for reproduction on T-shirts, coffee mugs, and even underwear. One of his popular epigrams says "Your smile is one of the great sights of the world." He reads some others:

AB: "'By doing just a little every day, I can gradually let the task completely overwhelm me.' 'No man is an island, but some of us are long peninsulas.' 'Instead of past, present and future, I prefer chocolate, vanilla and strawberry.' Oh, here's a good one for a journalist: 'My sources are unreliable, but their information is fascinating.'"

MO: Some sayings are funny, others are ironic. They all have the ring of truth, he says, or people won't buy them. He says the rise of the Internet has been good for the epigram business.

AB: "The postcard business has declined, but the Internet business is growing all the time. And I'm just on the verge of bringing out what I hope will be our most popular product, a database, a piece of software, containing all my work, both the text and the pictures."

MO: After more than 35 years and thousands of epigrams, he says the task of writing them is getting more difficult.

AB: "I've grown a little weary. I don't intend to go on forever. In fact, I'm thinking of stopping at 10,000, which I'm now approaching."

MO: But at 70 years of age, the writer of epigrams is still satisfying his fans and rounding out his extensive body of very short works. Mike O'Sullivan, VOA News, Los Angeles.

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September 2, 2004 - Wordcount.org

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Broadcast on COAST TO COAST: September 2, 2004

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: counting words.

RS: If you wanted to show people the 88,000 most common words in English, how would you do it? Jonathan Harris thought of a sentence -- or something that looks like one. He works on interactive art projects. He laid out the words in a straight line, from the most frequently used to the least frequently used.

AA: This is all on a Web site, so you keep clicking to the right to read the words on the screen. Or you can look up specific words to see their ranking. There's also a visual trick that displays the words as a graph. The most common are in really big type; the least common are in really small type.

RS: Jonathan Harris is an artist in the field of "information visualization." What he created is wordcount-dot-org.

JONATHAN HARRIS: "The experience I was trying to create for the user was like an archeologist sort of sifting through sand. And you never really get a look at the whole language at any one time. You really have to zero in one specific part and explore there. And in this sense you can really spend hours just killing time on this and playing around."

RS: "You say it's like one very long sentence, but is there anything connecting these words?"

JONATHAN HARRIS: "That's what's really interesting, and this is the one aspect of WordCount that people have really gravitated toward, as I've found. Because the data is essentially random -- I mean, it's not random, but the fact that a given word is next to another word is only based on how often those words appear in normal English usage. But when you have 88,000 words placed back to back, chances are pretty good that a few of those sequences are going to form some pretty conspiratorial meanings.

"Every morning I sort of come into work and I check my e-mail and I have a pile of e-mails waiting for me from people all around the globe that have found interesting sequences in WordCount. Some of my favorites are words 992 to 995 are 'American ensure oil opportunity.' Then 4304 to 4307 is 'Microsoft acquire salary tremendous.'"

AA: "I like this one, 5283 to 5285, which is 'angel seeks supper.'"

JONATHAN HARRIS: "Exactly. I found that a lot of people suggest that this be used as a good device for people trying to come up with a name for their band."

RS: "How is it determined, the frequency of any given word?"

JONATHAN HARRIS: "The frequency is data that is not generated by me. The frequency data was all coming from this source data that I used, which is the British National Corpus and that's a collection of written and spoken English words that were collected over a few years, I think back in the mid-1990s, by this group in England. It's a little bit dated; I've found one word that people are often surprised does not appear at all in the archive is blog. So clearly the phenomenon of Web logging came up after this data was collected."

AA: "So now you describe this basically as an 88,000-word-long sentence, starting with the word 'the,' the most frequently used word in the English language. What's at the other end?"

JONATHAN HARRIS: "The other end is surprising, and this is a big point of contention for a lot of people that actually find what the last word is. But the last word, surprisingly or not, is conquistador. And if you look through the list and you spend some time with it, you'll find that there are many words much, much further in front of conquistador that you've never even heard of. So clearly there seems to be some errata in their data."

AA: "So conquistador, as in a Spanish conqueror?"

JONATHAN HARRIS: "Some other interesting sort of comparative rankings: war is 304 and peace is 1,155. Love beats hate, Coke beats Pepsi and love beats sex by over 1,000."

AA: "Now this is according to British usage from a few years ago, right?"

JONATHAN HARRIS: "That's right, so maybe this has all changed since then. WordCount went online about five months ago, and almost nobody saw it for about four months. And then back at the beginning of July a friend of mine posted it on his blog and within about a day or two days, the site was getting about 20,000 unique visitors a day.

"And I was getting e-mails from all over the world, mainly people taking issue with some of the apparent disparities in the data, how some seemingly obscure words were being placed ahead of seemingly more common ones, but other people that were just sort of touched by how fun it was. And people, you know, found these little comparisons entertaining, like the Coke and Pepsi, and the love and the hate, and the war and the peace. Things like this."

RS: Jonathan Harris, talking to us from Fabrica, a creative think tank for young artists where he has a year-long fellowship. It’s located near Venice, Italy, and it's where he developed wordcount dot o-r-g.

AA: And that's all for this week. Our e-mail address is word@voanews.com. And our Web site is voanews.com/wordmaster. With Rosanne Skirble.

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