They Might be Peevers
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Here's a mystery for you. Last summer, the weekly radio show Studio 360 recorded an episode at the Aspen Ideas Festival. The show, which originally aired on 7/17/2009 and ran again yesterday, included a segment about the list of things that members of They Might be Giants "are not allowed to say within the band".
Now, it's not a mystery that Studio 360 did a show at the Aspen Ideas Festival — I don't know much about either outfit, but they seem like a match. And the existence of the list is also not a mystery:
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well th[is] this i[s] comes from our drummer Marty Beller who um
has been harboring these resentments about
over
used phrases that don't actually-
that no longer mean a[nything] have lost their flavor like chewing gum
over time
uh and f[inally] and he finally
has prescribed [sic] them
A significant proportion of the population "harbors resentments" of this kind, as well as grudges about grammar, pronunciation, word usage, and so on. (It's a bit of a mystery why so many of these people are confused about the difference between prescribe and proscribe, but I digress…)
And it's not a mystery that Kurt Anderson decided to feature Beller's list of resentments on a segment of his show — he knew, or sensed, that lists of linguistic peeves are the most popular New Media topics outside of porn, at least as calibrated by the number of comments they attract.
No, the mystery is that the Studio 360 web site picked up only two comments on that segment!
And the mystery deepens over at the Studio 360 blog, where despite giving Marty Beller's full inventory of 30 forbidden phrases, and inviting readers to "share which phrases you think should be on the list!", they picked up only one more comment ("Celebrity Pet Peeves", Studio 360 blog, 7/22/2009).
There are two logical possibilities: either the members of Studio 360's audience are miraculously free of linguistic resentments; or else hardly any of them ever go to the program's web site.
If you're interested in TMBG, or in the subspecies of linguistic peeving that focuses on phrases that are felt to be over-used, you might want to listen to the whole thing:
If you listened, you probably didn't notice that there's another mystery here, namely why you probably didn't notice how spectacularly disfluent the program's host is. For example:
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I- I- I was struck by this- this I guess uh recent sort of public communiqué you made
and- and- and- and made a list- or published this list of words that no one in the band is allowed to say.
Edited to remove the six stutter-like false starts, the three-word self-correction, the filled pause, and the semi-meaningless temporizing "sort of", this is about 26 words:
I was struck by this recent public communiqué you made and published this list of words that no one in the band is allowed to say.
But even after removing 12 words to yield a 26-word edited form, the sentence doesn't quite parse. Given the chance to reflect, Anderson might revise it to something like:
I was struck by your recent public announcement of a list of words and phrases that no one in the band is allowed to say.
I've noticed something similar in the case of many other well-regarded speakers, Their level of disfluency, far from being especially low, is in fact extremely high in quantitative terms — often much higher than average. I described one such case here, but I could give you many more, from talk-show hosts, Supreme Court justices, cable news talking heads, and others.
I don't mean to suggest that disfluency is essential to perceived fluency — though a version of that is probably not far from the truth. In cases of this kind, the speakers may deploy their disfluencies in ways that actually help communication, by avoiding dead air, by signaling states like excitement or caution, by helping to create a sound structure analogous to the information structure of their message. In any case, listeners generally "hear through" these disfluencies and don't even notice how pervasive they are.
But the next time that a public figure strikes you as lacking in verbal facility, you might try to figure out what you're actually responding to, and why.
JT said,
August 8, 2010 @ 9:44 am
I listened to the clip with in it several times, and each time it sounds more like proscribed than prescribed. Now, I'm accustomed to hearing the prefixes pro- and pre- blur into a sort of non-distinct pah-/pre-/pro-/per- (I expect this is a known phenomenon. I'm from the Northeastern US, if it makes a difference.), but this speaker gets closest to pro- in my ears.
[(myl) Are you perhaps expecting an [i] vowel in "prescribe"? As I explain in response to another comment below, I hear a fairly clear [ɛ] vowel. And the formants (after getting away from the /r/) are roughly 510 and 1480, compared to 465 and 1024 in the first syllable of his "over" — it's a fairly front vowel, much fronter than I'd expect for the first syllable of "proscribe", though not quite as front as his [ɛ] in "Beller", whose formants I measure at 630 and 1560. You can listen to the word by itself here.]
Trimegistus said,
August 8, 2010 @ 9:47 am
I think some of this "disfluency" is actually affected — "my thoughts are so profound and come in such a flood I can scarcely put them into words!" Note how it's almost endemic on Public Radio, but vanishingly rare on other radio channels.
[(myl) I agree that there are distinct styles associated with different media groupings, but I think this characterization is unfair — there are public radio personalities who rarely exhibit this stuttering, self-correcting style, and talking heads on (for instance) cable news channels who do. This would be a good topic for a term paper, though — you could probably get a publication out of it as well. ]
KWillets said,
August 8, 2010 @ 10:57 am
The interviewer is interrupted and finishes by completing the interviewee's sentence.
KWillets said,
August 8, 2010 @ 11:25 am
Technically, he's not completing, he's extending the predicate of the completed sentence.
groki said,
August 8, 2010 @ 11:26 am
using the terms of the middle red text, I interpreted the audio of the original red text something like:
I was struck by this recent public communiqué you made and–interruption–[ I was struck by how you ] published this list of words that no one in the band is allowed to say.
my sense of the speaker's fluency was aided by the way he maintained the meaning flow around an obstacle.
Chad Nilep said,
August 8, 2010 @ 11:28 am
I am reminded of Claudia Puchta and Jonathan Potter (1999), Asking elaborate questions: Focus groups and the management of spontaneity. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3(3), 314-335.
As I recall, the "best" focus group leaders in terms of developing useful data for marketers are the "worst" leaders in terms of asking clear questions and keeping the conversation tightly focused.
From the abstract:
This paper analyzes question formats in a corpus of German market research focus groups. In particular, it identifies and studies the use of 'elaborate questions' (questions which include a range of reformulations and rewordings). […] [Elaborate questions] help manage a dilemma between the requirements that the talk should be both highly focused on predefined topics and issues, and at the same time spontaneous and conversational.
Andrew Dowd said,
August 8, 2010 @ 11:28 am
It sounded to me like he actually said "proscribed" rather than "prescribed."
[(myl) FWIW, I hear a fairly clear [ɛ] vowel. And the formants (after getting away from the /r/) are roughly 510 and 1480, compared to 465 and 1024 in the first syllable of his "over" — it's a fairly front vowel, though not quite as front as his [ɛ] in "Beller", whose formants I measure at 630 and 1560. You can listen to the word by itself here.]
Garrett Wollman said,
August 8, 2010 @ 11:31 am
Given how heavily NPR programs are edited, there must be a reason why this was not. (Although Studio 360 is a PRI program.) WNYC stablemate "On the Media" did a segment a few years back exploring just how heavily NPR is usually edited. (Summary: they normally remove all of this stuff to make their guests sound better.) This is one of the reasons it takes a whole week to produce an hour show of this sort, whereas a "live-to-tape" show with only minimal editing (like "Says You!") can be posted in less than a day. (But NPR News puts the same sort of editing effort into their actualities; I have no idea how many editors they must have on staff to make that work.)
[(myl) This was a live show, recorded in front of an audience, so they couldn't do multiple re-takes. I guess they still could have edited out some of the false starts, but why? My experience is that if you don't draw people's attention to it, they don't notice. And as I said, maybe it even works better to leave it in.]
groki said,
August 8, 2010 @ 11:31 am
though I like KWillets' interpretation too, involving switching to the interviewee's perspective.
JC Dill said,
August 8, 2010 @ 12:03 pm
I hear, and am bothered by this type of stuttering speech. But I find it MUCH preferable to the endless repeating-myself from talk radio hosts! Driving from Salinas to San Jose yesterday late afternoon – there's a radio wasteland mid-way where FM signal is very weak and attempts to pull in any stations (from Monterey/Salinas or from San Jose/SF) results in static or crosstalk from stations on the same frequency in a different region. So I switched over to 810 am (KGO) and picked up the beginning of the 6-o'clock program. The host repeated his theme for Thirty Minutes, endlessly stating and re-stating his topic and his views on the topic (if Judge Walker should stay his ruling on Prop 8 or not). There was about 2 minutes of actual content, rephrased and repeated. I was fascinated by how many different times he returned to the same sub-issue and said it all over again with just slightly re-wording it. There was a commercial break, and when he returned from the break he summarized All Over Again, taking 10 minutes to repeat what he previously took 10 minutes to say. Then when he (finally) took the first caller at 6:30, he closed the call by again restating his own position (in detail) on the issue.
I'll take the PRI's Radio 360 occasional stuttering over this Talk Radio diarrhea of the mouth any day.
Larry Lard said,
August 8, 2010 @ 1:20 pm
>> I was struck by this recent public communiqué you made and published this list of words that no one in the band is allowed to say.
> But even after removing 12 words to yield a 26-word edited form, the sentence doesn't quite parse.
The addition of a single punctuation mark (a colon after 'published') makes this parse perfectly – and that's even if, as questioned above, it is actually what was said.
[(myl) Weak. It's clear from the way he said it that he meant "published" to be grouped to the right with "this list of words…" as its object, not to the left as part of the relative clause "[that] you made".]
Garrett Wollman said,
August 8, 2010 @ 2:26 pm
@myl "This is PRI, not NPR"
As indeed I noted. But WNYC produces a wide variety of national shows for both major syndicators; I very much doubt that their editors are trained to treat NPR and PRI shows differently. On the other hand, each show has its own distinctive "sound" — I doubt anyone confuses "Studio 360" and "RadioLab" after more than 15 seconds of listening — and the staff tend to stick with a particular show. On the gripping hand, live-to-tape shows are, as noted, generally edited less — more for quantity than quality, as it were.
One might compare last week's show, which was produced in the usual way, to this week's rerun, to see if Kurt Anderson sounded tighter last week. (My suspicion is that he does, but haven't done the experiment.)
[(myl) Oops, sorry for the egregious lack of attention to what you actually wrote!
I continue to think that a comparison of performance/editing styles among shows would be interesting.
You're right that editing is an important part of the picture. Once I was in a radio studio being interviewed (remotely), and in the next studio, a well-known and deservedly respected program was being recorded. I was shocked by how disfluent the host was, and how many retakes there were for fairly simple stretches of the program (including retakes of questions for an interview that had apparently taken place at some point in the past).]
George said,
August 8, 2010 @ 3:42 pm
"In any case, listeners generally "hear through" these disfluencies and don't even notice how pervasive they are."
Several years ago, I was driving home listening to a George W. Bush press conference. The disfluency was extremely distracting. When I arrived home, I turned on the TV and watched the remainder. The disfluency notably decreased.
Are we accustomed to "hearing through" disfluencies and the filtering varies according to context? Is there a continuum like seen & heard > heard only > transcribed verbatim?
digory said,
August 8, 2010 @ 3:54 pm
I will defer to Mark's analysis, but I clearly understood "proscribe" when I heard this show yesterday. Perhaps because I was expecting, or hoping, that TMBG would get that one right.
I was also struck by the host's disfluency, which I took to be partly due to lack of hostly skill (did he totally cut Susan Orlean off in mid-sentence, or was that just me?) and partly to the unscripted nature of a live event.
I wasn't impressed by the peeve list, either; many of the proscripted phrases seem like perfectly useful snippets of English. But I have to admit that I thought of them again this afternoon when I read an article about radiation shielding for a Jupiter-bound spacecraft:
The strategy? Give Juno a kind of six-sided lead apron on steroids.
ok, no. You may not say that.
Adrian Bailey said,
August 8, 2010 @ 4:05 pm
Like JT and AD, I lean towards a hearing of "proscribed".
[(myl) Do you normally have [əʊ] or [ɛɔ] for the GOAT vowel? That would explain why something a bit back of [ɛ] sounds like /o/ to you, but like /ɛ/ to me.]
mgh said,
August 8, 2010 @ 5:10 pm
seconding KWillets's interpretation. the speaker is incorporating the interruption into his own speech.
AJD said,
August 8, 2010 @ 10:23 pm
I agree that it's "proscribed". And Mark, your arguments about the vowel sounding like /o/ or /ɛ/ fail to move me, because as far as I'm concerned "proscribed" and "prescribed" have or can have the same pronunciation, namely with a reduced inital syllable containing [ə]. Given that we can't reliably use the pronunciation to tell the difference between "proscribed" and "prescribed", we have to resort to the inferred meaning of the sentence, which suggests that "proscribed" was what was meant.
Jack Hundley said,
August 8, 2010 @ 10:26 pm
I think the proscribed/prescribed issue is that a lot of us don't use /o/ for proscribed often if at all. That seems almost a Canadian-style overpronunciation ("Ottawa") to me.
Jerry Friedman said,
August 9, 2010 @ 12:31 am
One vote for prescribed.
Normally I'd pronounce an o like that as a schwa, but not in proscribed in most contexts, because it would get confused with the much more common prescribed.
John said,
August 9, 2010 @ 12:48 am
pro- not pre-
I'll admit it sounds schwa-ish, but distinctly not prescribe to my hears, even if not clearly an -o- either.
Molly said,
August 9, 2010 @ 2:31 am
With respect to the question of NPR/PRI and "intentional" disfluency, some time ago I saw a video of Ira Glass talking about the process of learning to become a radio reporter. He plays a clip of a radio story from early in his career, and then talks about what he's learned since then.
The early clip is striking in its lack of disfluency, and Glass criticizes it as sounding too unnatural, not enough like regular speech. (It does in fact sound more like a person reading than a person speaking.) When he retells the story as he now thinks it should be told, it is straightforwardly and with the breaks, "like"s, and "uh"s that are typical of Glass's work on the radio now.
[the video I'm talking about is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hidvElQ0xE%5D
richard howland-bolton said,
August 9, 2010 @ 8:33 am
I must admit that I actually write stutters and the like into the scripts of my wireless essays.
Makes them seem more real and sincere somehow—and remember 'If you can fake sincerity…'
digory said,
August 9, 2010 @ 12:07 pm
Having slept on it, here's my a new theory. I think that the pronunciation of "prescribe" in real life is actually more like pə- (sorry, I don't know IPA). In casual speech I think the "r" is pretty much elided, or only slightly pronounced at best. ("Prescribe" is one of those words that I have to think about when I type — yes, it does start "pre", though I don't ordinarily hear it that way — and in fact I have the same problem with "perform", the beginning of which is pronounced almost identically.) So when someone says prə-, it's a more deliberate pronounciation that either implies "pro-", or makes the listener prick up their ears for the context.
This is the sort of hypothesis that is easily testable, but IANAL :-)
blahedo said,
August 9, 2010 @ 11:35 pm
I'm pretty sure "prescribed" and "proscribed" are homonyms, or at least have strongly overlapping distributions, in my own speech. Certainly I think it would be incumbent on anyone taking a transcription to interpret charitably.
As for the sentence that "doesn't quite parse", you should remember that it's an interrupted utterance: during the stuttered word "and", one of the Johns interrupts him and says "yes, we've gone public"; and I actually heard the remainder of the announcer's utterance as a continuation of that sentence. So:
ANN: I was struck by this recent public communiqué you made-
John: Yes, we went public.
ANN: -and published this list of words that no one in the band is allowed to say.
And *that* is grammatical. On a re-listen I can see either way, but I don't think it's a stretch to see the second half as at least distracted by the "we went public" interruption.