Power of words and Mysterious Lactobacillic Drink from Asia

There was a drink I liked from childhood. It is a concentrated lactobacillic drink you dilute with water. It is white in colour, and it tastes a little sour but also sweet. It was a product of Japan.

Our family moved to Australia when I was 7, and I was happy that I could take to school drink bottles with juice in it. My mother got hold of that concentrated drink from a Japanese import food shop, and let me take that drink to school.

I was new to the school, and my classmates were very curious of everything I had. They looked at my pencils, rubber, pencil case, lunch box, and my drink bottle. The Japanese girl had different lunch, so they wanted to taste a little. They were also curious about what was in the drink bottle.

I could not speak English well, but I could tell that my classmates wanted to taste my lunch and drink, so I let them have some. My friends liked the drink, so they asked me what the name of the juice was. I proudly said,

"Calpis!" (It was the name of the product)

"Oooh, yuck! Cow pis!"

"???"

My friends who just had enjoyed the drink was now making a great fuss about it. I could not figure out what had gone wrong.

Later I found out that 'Calpis' sounded very similar to 'cow pis', and my friends thought that they had drank "it".

Words put ideas in your head. After this incident, my friends did not ask me for a sip of my drink although it was not 'cow pis' at all. Words are powerful.

This was years before export version of Calpis was made. Now, the export version had arranged the name of the product to "Calpico". Sales-wise, I think the re-naming was a wise choice.

http://www.calpico.com/calpico/index.html

Verbal Diarrhea

Not quite sure of what we are talking about, one of my friends once said "verbal diarrhea" at some point of the conversation.

What's so interesting about a phrase "verbal diarrhea" is its combination of the word, or "collocation." Collocation means the way in which some words are often used together, or a particular combination of words used in a fitting context.

Examples in Japanese:

心臓破りの　➡　坂
燦然と　➡　輝く
気丈に　➡　振る舞う
机上の　➡　空論　

場末の　➡　スナック

Not necessarily so, but most people connect the words with a rather limited, particular choice. You can say there is chemistry between them.

Example in English

Perfunctory --- kiss
Sneaky --- feeling
Pique --- one's interest

They seem to have a strong bond, good compatibility, so to speak!

Back to "verbal,"
this adjective means "spoken rather than written/relating to words or using words," which follows like: "Verbal expression, verbal communication, verbal abuse"

On the other hand, "diarrhea" is frequent and watery bowel movements, caused by infection or food poisoning.

Far from being a match with "verbal" !

Yet, unexpected combination sometimes attracts attention if its not entirely incomprehensible. What kind of verbal exchange is its diarrhea? Positive or negative? Formal or Casual? Serious or funny? The phrase makes us wonder about various contexts in which it is used.

Although new words are being created day by day, a number of them are limited. However, there are innumerable possibilities of collocating, playing with them, chances in which you put them in a seemingly nonsense way, but they turn out to be somewhat connotative, artistic, even in retrospect close to truth.

Bob was seeing Mrs. Smith...

My story about progressive tense.
(cf. "I'm lovin' it" entry Oct 5th http://barefootphilolo.blogspot.jp/2016/10/im-lovin-it.html).

I teach English grammar to teenagers, and I quite enjoy it. I discover a lot about the language from teaching and also checking my students' mistakes. Some grammar mistakes make me (with my wild imagination) imagine really surreal scene.

There is an exercise worksheet that focuses on usage of simple past and continuous past. The verb is given, and you have to change the tense to either simple past or continuous past to complete the sentence. In one exercise, there is a boy called Bob and it tells about what he did one morning.

Some students answer like this:

     While he ( was walking ) to class, he ( was seeing ) Mrs. Smith.

Verbs of sense usually do not take progressive tense, but when it does, it carries a different sense. "See" when used in the progressive tense would mean "to spend time with someone".

And here is where my wild imagination comes into action.

Well, Bob was seeing Mrs. Smith before going to school. Is there something going on between those two?

Simon & Garfunkel's "Mrs. Robinson" starts playing in my head.

An innocent grammar exercise is now a scene of an affair...
Imagine, the world is full of fun.

"I'm lovin' it"

The McDonald started to use “I’m lovin’ it” as a slogan in 2003, with which we are very familiar on TV commercial and advertisement anywhere.

The adoption of the expression might symbolise the spread of an idea of "World Englishes."

Usually, “love” cannot take “progressive tense” (formed from the verb “be” and the suffix “ing”) because it is a “stative verb,” verbs that refer to mental states, attitudes/emotions, perceptions, or other state of existence.

Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English lists the verbs that occur less than 2 per cent of the time in progressive aspect:

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Mental/attitude verbs: 
agree, appreciate, believe, conclude, desire, know, like, want (p. 163)

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Practical English Usage also lists “Non-progressive verbs”:

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Mental and emotional states

Believe, doubt, feel (=have an opinion), hate, imagine, know, (dis)like, love, prefer, realise, resognise, remember, see (=understand), suppose, think (=have an opinion), understand, want, wish (p. 457)

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It's interesting the former doesn't includes "love," while the latter lists it as "Non-progressive verb."

No reference to "love" in Longman indicates the growing acceptance of the expression with progressive aspect, which might partly be influenced by the dissemination of the MacDonald's ads.

David Crystal, one of the greatest linguists of our time, mentions it in his lecture, which we will see later on.

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Works Cited

Swan, Michael. Practical English Usage, 3^rd ed. Oxford: OUP, 2005.

Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, eds. Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Pearson Education, 2002.

Headless Charles -- Comma, the silent killer -- case file 01

Punctuation was invented to work like traffic signs for language so that regardless of the presence of the writer, the written text could be read and construed according to the meaning meant by the writer of the text.

There are many members in the punctuation marks (I tend to see the marks as little living things, faithfully executing their function), and I think comma is quite a tricky one. Against its tiny quiet appearance, the presence or the absence of the comma can be a killer to the sense of the text.

I was a 4th grader in primary school in Australia sitting in an English class. Our teacher wrote on the board this sentence.

"Charles the First walked and talked five minutes after his head was chopped off."

From my very early childhood, I loved imagining, assembling pictures in my mind, and of course, from the sentence, I was imagining in detail how a person five minutes after his decapitation would walk and talk. In my surreal imagination world, a headless person walking and talking was perfectly possible, and who knows, there could have been some kind of magic used in the 17th century England.

Our teacher asked us,
"Now, don't you think this sentence is funny?"

I thought,
"Oh yes, it is certainly funny. Charles 1st would bump into things if he walked, and if he talked he would have to use sign language or some other organ to get his voice out."

But then, the teacher added a comma to the sentence:
"Charles the First walked and talked, five minutes after his head was chopped off."

The comma pulled me back to the real world; pulled me five minutes before the beheading.

At 4th grade, I realized what how lethal comma was. Its presence can keep us in the real world, its absence lets us dive into the surreal.

Personally, I prefer the surreal.

The Hobbit from TOEIC 900?

One of the greatest philologists of the last century was J.R.R. Tolkien (Cf. Tolkien as a Philologist).

One may associate his novel The Hobbit with a genre of children's literature. Tolkien actually intended it for kids, but one may wonder why the book (below) has a cover saying it is for the English learner whose TOEIC score is above 900.

It's not a book for children at all, nor a simple, plain tale of fantasy.

Of course, the TOEIC score is just one measure by which to assess one's English skill, but 900 is very high, far from being an easy reading material. The score might be indicative of Tolkien's creation of highly complicated as well as sophisticated world.

Typhoon, tycoon, tyranny and Tyrannosaur Part 2

(The second half of me letting my imagination fly from "typhoon, tycoon, tyranny and Tyrannosaur")

And then, I went on to thinking about 'tyranny' and 'Tyrannosaur'.

I guess that when archaeologists found the full set of skeletal structure for the largest carnivorous dinosaur, they must have imagined what fear it brought to other creatures living in same age. 

"Here comes thumping and whipping its thick fat tail the hungry big-headed humongous meat-eating creature with great big munching jaws lined with lethal set of sharp teeth!!!!"

So, this predator was named 'Tyrannosaur'. One of them even has -rex on the end of its name, which means "king"! How powerful could you get!

Then, what about the word 'tyranny'?

Now, I imagine that this kind of word is born from the side of the ruled, not the ruler, and in a culture where it has seen a great domination over people. If you are in power, you have no fear, you can do whatever you want. However, if you have been suffering under brutal domination for many years and you know who's or what's to blame, you would come up with a word to describe that, wouldn't you. You would want to share your agony and distress with the people under the same condition.

"Oh! That tyrant! We will be left with nothing, no food, no future if this tyranny goes on!"

Something you still might hear in a smoking room in a big company.

And this word 'tyranny' is Greek in origin. Yes, the ancient Greeks have dominated vast regions in the Mediterranean and later was dominated by the Romans.

Maki, having fun slipping myself to Asia, prehistoric ages and the ancient Greek world with words...