Semantic Compositions

*-berry

Oh, how work has been an annoyance lately. But interesting things are coming, most especially for what your host likes to think of as the Official Holiday of Semantic Compositions (hint: that's soon). In the meantime, though, a note on a culinary morpheme that's sweeping Los Angeles.

Once upon a time, an entire continent discovered it was lactose-intolerant, and thus was invented soymilk. This actually isn't relevant to the story on its own, but it makes the fact that a Korean entrepreneur hit it big in his home country by selling frozen yogurt just a little stranger. That yogurt, called Red Mango, was quickly imitated by a Korean immigrant to the United States who opened up a store in West Hollywood to sell frozen yogurt under the name Pinkberry, and therein lies our tale.

As detailed in this 2006 LA Times story, Pinkberry frozen yogurt attracts diehard fans, of which SC is emphatically not one. On a winter night around 10:30 p.m., SC walked by the Pinkberry location in Westwood, where he likes to go to the gym. The line was 20 people long. Since this was actually half the length of the lines he'd seen during the daytime on other days, he got in line and proceeded to be robbed of $5 for the most nauseatingly disgusting yogurt he'd ever eaten. Let's just say that it's not sweetened according to American tastes. Not a bit. However, SC nevertheless admires the clever packaging of the stores, which look exactly like what you'd imagine if Sanrio had been contracted to produce a business for Hello Kitty to run (Hello Kitty being the most hopelessly, irresistibly cute character ever drawn).

Pinkberry's success has spawned a wave of imitators, and now we come to the linguistic hook. Just as the '80s craze for drive-through taco stands in San Diego spawned a wave of "Bertos" (Roberto's, Alberto's, Aliberto's, Aiberto's, Gilberto's -- SC can't make this stuff up), there are now hordes of berries you never knew existed. While the LA Times story references a copycat called Kiwiberry (and spelled it wrong), there's now an Iceberry (which may or may not be a local outpost of a Korean chain by that name), Snowberry, and even a kosher imitator in Jewish L.A. called Berri Good. Little Tokyo features yet another knockoff which didn't pursue the "berry" morpheme, but nevertheless used a name suggestive of something floral/fruity, Fiore. There are probably more, but these are just the ones that your host has passed by in person to know about -- one of the annoying habits of the imitators is that they don't list themselves by these names in the Yellow Pages (and probably haven't registered fictitious business names ending in "berry" to avoid lawsuits).

Your host has seen this story play out before, and it generally ends badly -- a chain called Penguin's had Pinkberry-style success in the '80s (you'd get a taco at Roberto's, then go to Penguin's for dessert), and the quite professional website obscures the fact that the last few stores just closed late last year. For that matter, many of the Bertos haven't survived (although the original continues). So eventually, there won't be as many *berries as there are today -- but SC bets that before that happens, there will be plenty more.

SC's boondoggle-ridden childhood

Catching up on some of the Merriam-Webster Word of the Day e-mails which had been accumulating in the SC inbox, your host noticed a surprising definition for boondoggle:

boondoggle   \BOON-dah-gul\   noun
     1 : a braided cord worn by Boy Scouts as a neckerchief slide, hatband, or ornament
    *2 : a wasteful or impractical project or activity often involving graft

No, number 2 was not the surprising definition. Having been a Tiger Cub, Cub Scout, Webelos (the most awkward acronym ever coined), and a Boy Scout (albeit only attaining the rank of First Class), this was news. It appears the current standard Boy Scout neckerchief slide hasn't changed much since SC last wore one, but the Scout catalog doesn't call it a boondoggle. For that matter, none of the available slides are called boondoggles in the catalog. Then again, all of them are basically napkin rings by a different name, and not "braided cords" per the definition. SC is actually hard-pressed to remember ever wearing anything that meets the "braided cord" description, although perhaps the object used for holding Webelos awards comes close.

A bit of further digging indicates that this is not unknown in the archives of Scouting. From an article prepared by the Scouting organization in Great Britain:

In the early days of the Scout Movement in Great Britain, the Scout scarf used to be tied loose knot at the neck and naturally became very creased. However it was known the Americans were experimenting by using a ring made from bone, rope or wood to keep their scarves together. Bill Shankley, aged 18 and one of two permanent camp site employees at Gilwell Park, had the job
of running the workshop and coming up with ideas for camping equipment. He found out about the American rings and decided to try and go one better. After various attempts with different materials he finally made a Turks Head knot - adopted in the days of sailing ships when seamen developed decorative forms of rope work
as a hobby - made from thin sewing machine leather belting. He submitted this to the Camp Chief and, no doubt, the Chief Scout, for approval and had it accepted.

The American rings were called 'Boon Doggles', most probably because they were made of bone, and the name was a skit on 'dog bones'. To rhyme with 'Boon Doggle', Shankley called his creation a 'Woggle'. An article in The Scout on 9th June 1923 by 'Gilcraft', called 'Wear a scarf woggle' made reference to the idea of having become very popular among Scouts who had been quick to imitate the fashion set by the Ist Gilwell Park Scout Troop (i.e.: Wood Badge
holders).

A woggle is apparently (at least as originally coined) a wood version of the device in question; the article goes on to mention that Lord Baden-Powell, the founder of Scouting, eventually standardized the use of the term in the 14th edition of the Boy Scout Handbook (called "Scouting for Boys" at the time):

The word 'woggle' was used by Baden-Powell in the 14th edition of Scouting for Boys (1929): It (the scarf) may be fastened at the throat by a knot or woggle, which is some form of ring made of cord, metal or bone, or anything you like. The 13th edition (1928) merely uses 'ring'. The standard World Brotherhood edition used the wording of the 14th edition but put woggle in inverted commas.

Based on this history, the Merriam-Webster definition would appear to be a little more vaguely worded than desirable. The original British boondoggle/neckerchief slide was made of braided leather, but into a ring shape, rather than a lanyard. This would explain the look of the neckerchief slide of today, which may only be molded, but nevertheless simulates the look of being made from rope. As for the boondoggle as hatband? Well, there are some 280-odd Google hits suggesting that, but almost every one repeats the definition from above, and given the history presented by the Scouts, it's hard to imagine that the uniform device crossed over from the neck to the head in any obvious way. The web is hardly the best place to investigate events of the 1920s and 1930s in detail, but suffice it to say that there would have to be more evidence for SC to buy the "hatband" definition.

Left unexplained is how such a useful device could have ended up lending its name to disastrous wastes of time and money. Maybe gangsters paid Bill Shankley to come up with that rather than doing KP?

You can't say that about work

Roger Shuy posted on Language Log this evening about Fish and Wildlife Service employees being forbidden to talk about polar bears in an official capacity, regarding this as an example of taboo speech (although in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek fashion). SC recognizes that deference to one of the great sociolinguists of the 20th century is a wise course of action, but he must register respectful disagreement nevertheless.

Organizations routinely control the dissemination of their public positions; that's the whole point of employing spokesmen. One reason that your host does not discuss his employer, except to disclaim any representation of their positions, is that they have a communications department which has sole authority to communicate official views to the public. This is fairly standard practice in both industry and government, and actually goes a lot further into organizations than that. It's typically the case that for any government contract, individuals designated as the official points of contact are the ones you go to -- and the only ones you go to -- to discuss contracting both before and after receiving an award. (A few minutes browsing FedBizOpps should satisfy your curiosity on this point; just pick a Cabinet department, put it in the search box, and you're all set to browse the solicitations.) In the past, SC has worked on contracts for the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security, and he would never dream of contacting so much as the heads of the offices overseeing his projects, never mind anyone titled Secretary -- the contact would almost certainly not be authorized, unless it occurred in some formally scheduled meeting.

Given the tightly prescribed nature of communications day-to-day in government business, it would be rather strange for Federal employees to have more freedom to deliver unapproved messages in occasional, highly public forums, than they do in everyday work. Unapproved should not be seen as meaning that sinister commissars are brutally beating down courageous dissenters -- it simply means anything that has not been through the exhaustive review process up the management chain. Is it the case that some of the higher-up types are Civil Service employees or political appointees who may not actually have the expertise to make scientific judgments? Sure. But it's just as true that folks with B.A.s in communications routinely exercise a prerogative regarding public statements over Ph.D.s in private industry, and everyone involved understands that's just the process. In a public forum, when the scientists involved are speaking as representatives of the Fish and Wildlife Service, they are subject to the same constraints that they are in their daily work.

This is clearly not the same situation that academics are subject to, and it's easy to understand how they might see censorship where  SC sees standard operating practice. But while academics certainly borrow the prestige of the institutions they're affiliated with when they speak -- how interesting would it be to conduct a conference where names and affiliations were stripped off the abstracts in the conference program, and see how it affected attendance? -- nobody is under the impression that they are making official policy for anyone. If Prof. Shuy declared tomorrow that all sentences should end "...with polar bears", even if his audience believed the administration of Georgetown University to be prepared to do whatever he said, nobody would seriously expect that this statement had come from the university president's office, much less the government. The same is true of professors who teach at public universities -- George Lakoff and John McWhorter don't speak for the State of California or Governor Schwarzenegger when they make pronouncements on even the least politically charged issues. As Federal employees, though, Fish and Wildlife Service scientists presenting papers do speak for the government, and they are most definitely not authorized to make policy on their own, for the simple reason that only one person in the government holds a power even remotely like that.

SC is not inclined to debate Prof. Shuy on the specifics of the scientific question at hand; neither of us are experts in wildlife management. However, he would note two pieces of evidence that tend to support his view that this is just usual business, and not any sort of ideological campaign. On the science front, the evidence of a global population decline appears to be fairly mixed, and with an open public comment period for making policy in effect at the time of the conference, it would be particularly inappropriate for Federal employees to be making statements that suggested policy had already been set. On the personnel front, Prof. Shuy's article quotes the head of the Fish and Wildlife Service as stating:

The prohibition on talking about these subjects only applies to public, formal situations, Hall said. Private scientific discussions outside the meeting and away from media are permitted and encouraged, he said.

This sounds pretty much like the normal state of affairs to SC. If credible evidence existed that scientists were being told to avoid discussing these issues altogether, that would be another story, but your host hasn't seen anything produced to that effect. Working for a government agency or commercial organization means accepting terms of employment that say that you don't get to make policy statements that may differ from the organizational consensus, and that appears to be exactly what's going on in this case. Is the process for setting that consensus perfect? Hardly. But tenure and academic freedom aren't the standards under which anyone accepts employment in non-academic contexts, and SC finds it hard to spot a scandal in established communications practices.

 

Get a grip on yourself

Having gotten over the flu, your host went to dinner with Mrs. SC and his parents recently, and got more than just a steak -- he got a particularly annoying earful of the morpheme "-self" to use as a topic.

To set the menu stage, the restaurant in question is the Coronado Boathouse, a steak and seafood business in the scenic Coronado resort area in San Diego. SC readers in the area may wish to attempt to experimentally confirm his observations by going for dinner and listening to the waiters.

At first, your host thought that he was listening to a simple speech error; when our party was seated, the waiter went around the table handing out menus and saying "Here's a menu for yourself". SC's inner prescriptivist, a generally powerless individual unable to enforce illogical rules of English punctuation (witness the placement of the period in the previous sentence), found this irksome but said nothing.

However, at some point during the meal, it became clear that this was not a simple error, but the product of either affectation or training, as unbound exemplars of "-self", with nary a discourse antecedent, continued to crop up. When, exactly, you ask? Maybe it was during the actual ordering, when the waiter asked "What will yourself be having for dinner?", or maybe it was the waving around of a peppermill to the tune of "Pepper for yourself?". Or maybe the light really went on with the gratuitously tacked-on, albeit grammatical, usage in "Would you like more iced tea for yourself?". (One could argue that the pepper was grammatically OK, being a phonologically-reduced version of "Would you like some pepper for yourself?" -- but surface forms have to count for something, and both the pepper and the selves were vigorously grating by that point.) By the time we exited the restaurant, SCself could barely be restrained from bursting out with, "Were yourselves annoyed by that waiter?".

Clearly, something other than reflexive usage was going on with all of the "yourself" utterances. There's no reason for the "self" to show up since it doesn't corefer with a previously mentioned subject, a point which Geoff Pullum has expressed with characteristic forcefulness before (albeit for a not-quite parallel usage). This can be done in the case of logophoric pronouns, as has been discussed on Language Log a number of times (for a history of it, see this Arnold Zwicky post), but logophoric is a fancy word for pronouns being used to attribute words to someone else, which isn't going on here, either.

Then SC stumbled across this Linguist List discussion of the phenomenon, which despite being over a decade old, manages to precisely anticipate what bothered "himself" about this usage. After demonstrating that unbound reflexives similar to the waiter's have a certain amount of historical legitimacy (Thomas Malory and Edith Wharton make appearances), it is revealed that the specific usage above is today the province of waiters and salesmen, and it gets chalked up to your choice of hypercorrection or politeness, depending on context. The author correctly (in SC's opinion) diagnoses the irritation felt by SC as being due to an "inappropriate" emphasis on status (that word strikes your host being exactly what's annoying here -- the pervasive use of "self" draws attention to the fact that the waiter is trying to be deferential). It seems likely that there's a more principled explanation of this phenomenon available by now, and hopefully your host will find some time to dig in to reflexivity literature and report on it to yourselves.

On a linguistically unrelated note, the restaurant features a "baseball top sirloin", which SC has long found a puzzling name. It's not particularly baseball-shaped, and it's not five ounces (the official weight of said ball). A brief Google search turns up 135 hits, at a variety of restaurants which don't appear to share common ownership. Actually, many of the steaks appear to be 10 ounces, which would be two baseballs, but the "Bag of Balls" cut might not sell too well. The closest thing to an explanation seems to be in this commercial butcher catalog, where the picture on page 27 shows a piece of meat which looks a lot more like a cube than the rest of the sirloin once they've been separated. SC supposes that's close enough to looking like a baseball, but considering the part of the cow that actually goes into making said balls, perhaps it's not the best choice of steak names from a marketing perspective anyway.