Physique

I was watching the FINA championships on tv when I was in Barcelona. They were taking place there so I should have tried to go to some events in person. I noticed the swimmers and divers had different physiques. None had any discernible body fat, but the swimmers had larger muscles than divers, who are built for agility in the air. Every kind of athlete has the typical physique of that athlete. Sprinters have large upper bodies but marathon runners are slight. Decathletes are athletic in a more generic way. They have to do shot put, jump, and run various distances. Offensive lineman weigh 300 pounds. Tennis players do not look like body builders. In fact, athletes in general do not have the engorged, hypertrophied muscles of those who build up their bodies for show. They are ripped, but without those grotesque-looking, bulging muscles.

So what does an "athletic physique" look like? Generally, low body fat, no large stomachs (except maybe for some weightlifters) and muscles that are functional for that particular sport. Muscles will be large when they need to be, but they have to be strong and efficient for the particular event. Guys who spend a lot of time in the gym won't be necessarily impressed by Ronaldo's physique, or Nadal's. There are plenty of average Joes in my gym with bigger biceps, but who don't earn millions playing a sport either.*

I'm just a 53-year old guy trying to get back into shape, look slightly ripped-er** than I am. I don't need to look like an elite athlete, (nor is there any danger of that!) but I think I'd rather look like that than like a body builder with humongous but essentially functionless muscles.

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*I've written this post with masculine bias, obviously, though the same principles apply to women, who also do body-building, swimming, diving, track, etc... I was noticing Stosur's marvelous upper arms in her loss to the young Victoria Duval the other day at the US Open.

**Yes, I now you can't make a comparative out of participle. Why not? What's the rule? Why can you say "shapelier" but not "differenter." ??

Bad Grammar

Claire Kramsch, at about makes the claim "I'm lovin it" of the McDonald's slogan is ungrammatical. (See link two posts below, about an hour into the video). I had no idea why she would make this claim. Then I looked it up.

It turns out that some grammar books claim that so-called "stative" verbs cannot be used in the progressive. No obviously this is false as a hard-and-fast rule of grammar. I was a little shocked that such an intelligent person would not realize that the situation is a lot more nuanced than that.

Of course, you can't just say "I am believing in God" when you mean to say "I believe in God." But you can say, "When did you stop believing in God?" or "I am remembering my dreams much more since I stopped drinking." You can use "loving" as a synonym for "enjoying," and in that case it can be used in the progressive. Waiters ask me how my food is tasting all the time. A stative can be used as a progressive to describe a more dynamic process. There is a big difference between "what does cilantro taste like?" and "how is the food tasting" [right now].

My basis for these claims are (1) My impeccable native speaker intuitions. (2)Evidence that such phrases are in common use. (3) The fact that you cannot change the progressive back into a straight present and maintain the same meaning. For example, "I love it" is not a substitute for "I'm loving it" in the slogan. "I love it" means I love it generally. "I love Indian food." "I'm loving this Indian food," means "I have been enjoying recently" or "I enjoy at the present moment, this Indian food."

A grammatical error is an actual mistake, when a native speaker slips up a bit. A nuanced use of a verbal mode to convey a different meaning is not a mistake.

The prestige grammar might not have caught up to the more dynamic use of the progressive with stative verbs. So much the worse for the prestige grammar.

Jonathan Mayhew

The other Jonathan Mayhew

Jonathan Mayhew uses abstraction, negation and appropriation as strategies to make works. He is interested in how culture is constantly reproducing itself. By re-imagining the intended functions of images, objects and words, it allows him new ways of looking and thinking about these things allowing the freedom to explore a new fictional space.

Translation course

I'm giving my undergrad translation course again. It's interesting that recent developments in SLA bolster my insight that a course that asks students to use their capabilities in English could be useful. The model of immersion, trying to get students to approximate the status of a monolingual speaker of the second language. Sure, it would be great if all our students sounded like native speakers, but you wouldn't expect a Panameñan to sound like an Argentine, or a Brit to sound like a Yank or an Aussie.

More prosody

Liberman has an incisive post but has an odd way of looking at musical meter.

UPDATE: He's changed some of his description in response to my points. I find it extremely odd that he doesn't know where the "one" of the musical measure is, or that he construed the bpm as 198 rather than 100. 198 would be a fast bebop tempo, and most hip hop is in the 80-110 range.

Baudelaire

Je suis comme le roi d'un pays pluvieux,

Riche, mais impuissant, jeune et pourtant très vieux,

Qui, de ses précepteurs méprisant les courbettes,

S'ennuie avec ses chiens comme avec d'autres bêtes.

Rien ne peut l'égayer, ni gibier, ni faucon,

Ni son peuple mourant en face du balcon.

Du bouffon favori la grotesque ballade

Ne distrait plus le front de ce cruel malade;

Son lit fleurdelisé se transforme en tombeau,

Et les dames d'atour, pour qui tout prince est beau,

Ne savent plus trouver d'impudique toilette

Pour tirer un souris de ce jeune squelette.

Le savant qui lui fait de l'or n'a jamais pu

De son être extirper l'élément corrompu,

Et dans ces bains de sang qui des Romains nous viennent,

Et dont sur leurs vieux jours les puissants se souviennent,

II n'a su réchauffer ce cadavre hébété

Où coule au lieu de sang l'eau verte du Léthé.

Here is an interesting poem with the title "Spleen," one of two poems with this title. (See also his book Paris Spleen.) In some theory of the lyric the crucial aspect is the situation of the speaking voice. Here the poem begins with "Je suis comme..." -- a simile. The entire poem describes the king of a rainy country in uncomplimentary terms. Not at all the standard "sensitive poet" persona, so that the third person gets reflected back on the first person speaker. The entire description is a kind of cliché, "royal decadence." Courtiers, the court jester, the alchemist, falconry, sexual debauchery, cruelty, and violence, are the ingredients of this cliché. Of course, the "decadent" movement in literature did not yet exist at the time: here we see Baudelaire inventing it, in fact.

The self-aggrandizement in comparing one's self to a king is undercut by the hyperbolic criticism of the "young skeleton," cruel and submerged in ennui.

The rhymes are consistently "riches"; in other words, the entire final syllable is identical: vieux and vieux, bettes and betes, con and con, lade and lade, beau and beau, lette and lette, pu and pu, viennent and viennent, té and thé. They alternate between feminine and masculine.

Viva Voce

I find lately that I want to read everything aloud. Silent reading is really not pleasant for me. It feels like skimming a text in search of information. I want that language in my mouth, and to hear it lliterally in my ears.

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It would really help language learners to read everything they are studying out loud. Then you are making sense of the text, forcing yourself to give emphasis to the right syllables and words. Make a checklist: in spanish p, t, and c must not have a burst of air; e and o must not have dipthongal glides. Intervocalic s is never voiced. There is no difference between b and v. Eliminating those pronunciations would make the average student twice as good. I still record myself and critique my own phonetics in Spanish.