I’m a German teacher outside of Washington, DC, in Loudoun County, Virginia–a county that still offers German at all its high schools and just about all its middle schools. This is a good place to be. The famously wealthy Fairfax County, where I live and where my children graduated high school, is letting German die off slowly and quietly in its schools. That’s really shameful, if you think about it. Fairfax considers itself in many respects to be the “home of the Internet.” Network Solutions, which was the sole registrar for all .com, .net, and .org domains through the 1990s, has its headquarters in Herndon, on the northwestern edge of Fairfax County.

German is the second-most frequently used language on the Internet, after English. Fortunately, Loudoun County, home to AOL and Dulles International Airport, is not as parochial as Fairfax, and still offers German widely. This means I am sure to have a job here for a long time.

The downside of this, however, is that I have five, count ‘em, five course preparations this year. Because I am the sole German teacher at a new school, I teach every level of German that is offered by the county: levels one through five (fifth-year being an Advanced Placement course). I know very few other teachers who have this pleasure. Whenever a school has more than one teacher, invariably somebody is doing two or more sections of the same course–two sections of second-year Spanish, for example. That means any given teacher’s five-class teaching load is divided up between, or among, only two or three different courses. But I get one class of each and every level. That’s the situation for most German and Latin teachers around here.

If you’ve taught school before, you’ll know what I mean when I say that I have to do five completely different shows every two days. Teaching is like the most demanding performance anyone ever gave. A teacher on the block schedule has to hold an audience’s attention for 90 minutes. That’s the standard length of a Las Vegas show. The difference between me and a Las Vegas show, however, is that there’s only one of me, while even a “one-man” show in Vegas has a whole crew of people behind it.

Oh–one other difference between me and a Las Vegas show: I get paid a teacher’s salary. And I get three personal leave (i.e., vacation) days during each school year. True, I get the summers “off”–but that means I have free time to take courses, lead student tours to Europe, and write and plan the county curriculum.

I am exhausted right now. That’s why this post is so long. I don’t have the energy to stop typing.

Think I’m going to go home and drink wine and watch the baseball playoffs now. The whole thing starts up again Monday morning, bright and early.

I’m trying to recall the last time I was guilty of an incorrection, but I’m sure I have been. Incorrection seems to me to be akin to hypercorrection, the alteration of an expression to make it sound “more correct,” but actually resulting in an ungrammatical structure. An example is the misuse of a phrase such as “my brother and I” when “my brother and me” is correct:

The bank sent my brother and I (should be “my brother and me”) a foreclosure notice on our office building. Maybe him and me (or is it “he and I”?) should have paid the rent on time.

The Language Loggers were prompted to comment on incorrections by a rather astounding post in Yarn Harlot, in which the Canadian Stephanie Pearl-McPhee reports receiving bizarre email critiques of her spelling, because it isn’t “American.” Although her blog is not at all language-related, she felt forced to respond to the abuse she received for spelling things in a Canadian way.

When Stephanie writes “centre” or “colour,” she is spelling these words the way she was taught in school. Her spelling stalker, however, thinks she should “get a clue.” (Well, I’m leaving off the rather rude opening part of that malediction.)

This linguistic xenophobia is similar to that expressed rather comically by the Conservapedia, a right-wing “answer” to Wikipedia that insists that all contributions conform to U.S. American spelling. Much to my amusement, the Language Loggers had a time with that one. (In a related thread of comment on Conservapedia, John Chew pointed out that Conservapedia is actually a high-school project that got some attention in the blogosphere recently.)

It must be nice to be so confident that you can go ahead and correct people’s mistakes, even if you are so poorly read you can’t recognize your own. Pride goeth before a fall.

One model was challenged about her lack of expression or involvement or the emotion in her face or something, and she accepted the validity of the challenge by responding, “I know, right?”

This is a locution I have only noticed in the past two years. I first heard it spoken by a really intelligent guy in my German 3 class last year. I understood what it meant, semantically, but the phrase deserves a bit of unpacking. When the phrase “I know” is used in English (that is, in just about all dialects of English worldwide), it signifies assent and acceptance of the point of view of a conversational partner. It’s a fairly confident assertion of acknowledgement, of agreement.

On the other hand, the questioning “right?” stuck onto the end of a sentence is a request of affirmation of an assertion and a simultaneous invitation to disagreement. Right? Don’t you think so? Do you agree with me?

So when a young speaker (and I’ve only heard this phrase used by speakers under the age of 25) combines the two, it seems to be a simultaneous assertion of confidence and an instant pulling back of that confidence so as not to seem too pushy. It seems to ask for a continuation of the conversation. If the interlocutors continue the conversation, it may branch into areas of disagreement, but so far they are of the same mind.

I tried to find a discussion of this on Language Log without success; likewise with Language Hat. But The Mot Juste contained a rather frustrated post deploring the spread of this phrase a couple years ago. EQ of The Mot Juste promises to answer it with a defiant, “no, you’re wrong. You obviously don’tknow, so don’t waste my time trying to convince me you do.”

But I don’t think that would actually happen in conversation, because I don’t think the phrase would be uttered if there weren’t already some basic agreement present in the conversation.

An entry today in the brilliant linguistics-related blog Language Log reminds me exactly why I hated the novel so much. A post by Geoffrey K. Pullum about a BBC interview with Jesse Sheidlower pointed, in a footnote, to an earlier post about DVC. In November 2004, Pullum took Brown to task for his facile use of an anarthrous noun phrase to open just about every one of his novels.

Reading Pullum’s post was a wonderful validation of my contempt for Brown’s work. A year ago I had developed the uneasy feeling that I was a strange fish for not liking DVC. Everybody else seemed to, after all.

But renowned linguist Pullum’s post reminded me why: Brown’s a hack. (See the November, 2004, post to understand the joke in that last sentence.)

(Bizarrely enough, the Washington Post largely ignored this moment, at least in the print edition. Dana Milbank, in his gushing review of the new press secretary, mentioned in passing, deep in the middle of his column, that Snow “risked some loaded language.” According to the Post website, this piece appeared on page A2 of the print edition, although I did not see it. A more critical piece by Dan Froomkin appeared only on washingtonpost.com, not in the print edition.)

In his very first briefing Tuesday, Snow casually used the term “hug the tar baby,” apparently to refer to refer to what might more neutrally be termed a “sticky situation.” His reference seemed to be to an old children’s story by Joel Chandler Harris, in which Brer Rabbit tricks Brer Fox into hugging a baby made out of tar, and thereby traps his nemesis the fox.

However, it is probably more commonly understood in American discourse as a racial slur, a very rude term for African Americans.

The thread of comments on ThinkProgress.org (at the time of this writing already numbering 291 comments) shows how racially charged this careless use of language is. While a lot commenters claim the whole flap is an instance of political correctness run amok, many others hear in the off-hand remarks by this occasional substitute for Rush Limbaugh an extraordinary insensitivity to the perception of this phrase.

Even if Snow was only thinking of the Brer Rabbit story, which is generally perceived nowadays to be somewhat racist on its own, he seems to have a tin ear when it comes to hearing the voice and lexicon of 21st-century America.

Race is still the big taboo of American life. This country, which was founded on a slave economy, is still trying, 142 years after our Civil War, to figure out who we are and how we should talk to each other. The Word Nerds did a show recently on Race and Language in which we tried to explore the edges of this taboo zone. In the back of our minds, Howard Chang and I know that there is a wide spectrum of possible reaction to racially charged speech, from very sensitive to very thick-skinned.

But whether you think the uproar is obviously justified or is a case of exaggerated political correctness, one would have to acknowledge that the choice of the term “tar baby” was a rather bizarre turn of phrase for Snow to use on his very first day on the job in front of the White House press corps. Whether Snow was subconsciously using the phrase as a racial slur or simply recalling the Brer Rabbit story, there is no way he should have let it pass his lips.

In our podcast, Howard Chang introduced the concept of “homophonic creep,” which is what happens when words that sound like offensive words become taboo, just because of their sound. One very well known example is a controversy in the Washingtron, DC local government in 1999 over the use of the non-offensive term niggardly.

But the Tony Snow flap this week is nothing like that. “Tar baby” is either a nasty racial slur, or else it’s a plot feature in a story that no one tells any longer because of its racial overtones. It is certainly not a phrase any educated public speaker should get away with using nowadays.

Certainly not a White House press secretary.

(I’m fascinated to see that Simran has posted pictures of Annik and Timo, from the first video version of their podcast that he had seen.)

It’s a bit funny that I’m getting my film news almost exclusively from Filme und so, because the original reasons I subscribed to it were that Annik Rubens, a podcasting colleague and acquaintance, is half of the team, and that it was one more way for me to listen to “real” German on a regular basis.

I am a 20-year-veteran German teacher with a Ph.D. in German from Vanderbilt University; I’ve published two books and some articles on German literature, etc., etc. Yet I probably will always feel inadequate as a speaker of German. I never lived in German-speaking Europe for more than four weeks at a time, I didn’t spend any growing-up years there, I am not married to a German, nor did I hear it spoken at home as I was growing up.

This is all to say that I never had a real, true, undiluted immersion in the German language. I can’t afford to travel to central Europe frequently, so I go there every two summers or so with American high school students. This is, of course, an intrinsically watered-down, or at least somewhat simplified, experience in the German language.

I sometimes feel like a poseur when I “do” German. Listening to myself converse with Annik last summer on Schlaflos in München, I felt like I sounded like a complete imbecile who could barely put together a simple sentence in German.

And yet–I wonder whether all non-native speakers of any language always feel that way?

As the title of this post suggests, I’m feeling that I have too many irons in the fire. This English idiom implies that I have too many projects going on at once, and one source suggests it has to do with blacksmithing. In any event, it means you’re trying to do too damn many things at one time.

That’s how I feel lately. I’ve been podcasting like crazy, keeping on with The Word Nerds week after week. We don’t have any sponsorship or advertising revenue yet, but we are hopeful that we may start making gasoline money soon. We have not missed a week since March 21, 2005, so we recently celebrated our first anniversary as a podcast. And we are happy to have a nice-sized worldwide audience.

I’m also teaching like crazy–three schools, three different administrations, three different sets of faculty meetings, and so on.

And the baseball season is about to start. There is an exhibition game in two days between the Washington Nationals, my hometown team, and the Baltimore Orioles, our rivals from the other league, 45 minutes up the road from Washington. The Orioles have a storied history, having won the World Series in 1983, and having fielded a number of successful teams until recently.

Luckily for the hapless Nationals, the Orioles have fallen on hard times, and even in spring training games, the Nats have beaten the O’s several times. After an unexpectedly strong first season in Washington, chances are pretty good that the Nats will suffer and bounce around the bottom of the division standings this year. No matter. I have good seats behind home plate.

I have a ticket for the Battle of the Beltways (Washington and Baltimore) on Friday of this week. And I got an email this morning telling me my season tickets for the Nats are on the way! They even gave me a tracking number! Life is good! Spring has sprung!

Categories: baseball, podcast, language, midlife