Tracing "Valley Girl" type "uptalk" back to Dust-Bowl era Okies...

... using the evidence of a recording of a 1940 interview with Woody Guthrie.
I should also forestall the readers who will respond "But it doesn't sound like Woody Guthrie is asking questions!" by asking them to apply the same judgment to Taylor Mali's famous "Totally like whatever" screed. And then to tell me what the difference between "yes/no question rises" and other sorts of final rises really is — after reading this.

"A century of complaints about business jargon."

At the beginning of the 20th century, people complained about “stop in,” “deliver the goods,” “win out,” “the straight dope,” “make good,” “get away with it,” “put one over,” “show down,” “come across,” “get wise,” “on the level,” “bawl him out,” “got his number,” “get his goat,” “get warm around the collar,” “hit the ceiling,” “fall for it,” and “get busy.”

All that seems so disconnected from business these days as we carp about "impactful," "going forward," "low-hanging fruit," and "at the end of the day."

Why blame business people? Maybe because we just don't like them too much anyway.

"A student, if he is on scholarship or has an ambitious mother, may actually try to earn all these merit badges."

"But if he has any spirit, he’ll murmur a well-chosen four-letter word and go out and get stoned. Or if he is exceptionally thoughtful, he may explore the contradictions embedded in these commandments...."

Writes Richard Lanham (in 1974, quoted by Mark Liberman, at Language Log) protesting the "commandments" laid down (purportedly) in books about writing style.

I detect some snobbery, as if it's low class to take the basics of writing style seriously. Those in the know can bypass that cant about clarity and... what?

ADDED: I've corrected this to show that Liberman was quoting Lanham. I knew Liberman was mostly quoting Lanham, but there are so many ins and outs of blocking and indenting that my eye lost track of where one author ended and the other began. I should have paid more attention to the reek of snobbery, because it's something people today are more fastidious about.

"Over the years, we've discussed Elmore Leonard at least as often as any other writer..."

Says Language Log (on the occasion of Leonard's death). What was it about Leonard's writing that caught the linguist's attention? There are a bunch of links to old posts. I clicked on "Elmore's Adverbs":

Yesterday I objected to Terrence Rafferty's description of Elmore Leonard's writing style as "no gassy speeches, just behavior in all its unaccountable variety"; and I even did a tiny stylometric experiment to support my impression that his characters -- the heroes as well as the villains -- are in fact unusually talky....

It turns out that I could instead have simply made an argument ad auctoritatem. Andrew Brown from Helmintholog sent in a link to his post "St. Elmore's Fire" (10/8/2005), in which he quoted this passage from B.R. Myers' review of The Hot Kid in the November 2005 Atlantic ("The Prisoner of Cool"):

Though pioneered a century ago by the English dandy Ronald Firbank, and then popularized by a man whose first name was Evelyn, the technique of letting conversation carry a story is regarded in America as the tough guy’s way to write a novel, and Leonard makes no secret of his pride in it. Unfortunately, it compels him (as it did Firbank and Waugh) to stick to talkative characters. This excludes the true professionals on both sides of the law, leaving us with small-time cops and ex-cons who rarely keep quiet long enough to seem cool. They’re street-smart for sure, but although the recurring interjection “The fuck’m I doing here?” certainly puts Sartre in a nutshell, no one seems to think about anything, at least not anything interesting.

Spelling...

... rage.

"As frustratingly late as it was — Mr. Obama could and should have said years ago much of what he said today..."

"... there is no underestimating the importance of that statement."

So say the editors of The New York Times.

No underestimating?! What?

So if I say Obama's speech is the least significant thing ever said in the history of mankind, I'm still not underestimating it?

The editorial ends:

There have been times when we wished we could hear the right words from Mr. Obama on issues like these, and times we heard the words but wondered about his commitment. Today was not either of those moments.

There have been times when I have read the Times and wondered why the Times was putting things in those words and times when I have read the words out loud in an effort to hear whether these words were the right words. Today was both of those moments.

ADDED: Language Log has a post "Overestimating, underestimating, whatever."

It started when a friend, in conversation, said something like "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people. [pause] Or overestimating. Whatever."

"There is a statue outside the Federal Trade Commission of a powerful, rambunctious horse being reined in by an extremely muscular man."

"This used to be a metaphor for liberalism. The horse was capitalism. The man was government, which was needed sometimes to restrain capitalism’s excesses."

Wrote David Brooks, getting just about everything wrong.

Oh, well, we all get distracted and lose our minds when gazing upon extremely muscular men, do we not?

"Let's take a look at the prehistory of *cough*-style asterisking in comic strips..."

"... and the more recent usage as a form of 'cyberpragmatics.'"

Delving deeply into the question whether the Chinese have a word for "nerd."

You remember the discussion after NYT columnist David Brooks asserted that the Chinese don't have a word for "nerd." Victor Mair at Language Log has a lot to say on the subject:

First of all, we have to know what "nerd" itself means.  It doesn't just signify a bookish or pedantic person, but rather someone who is socially inept or square (try finding an exactly equivalent word for that in Chinese!), perhaps, but not necessarily, because of a consuming commitment to intellectual or technical pursuits....

I asked about thirty native speakers of various Sinitic languages and topolects how they would say "nerd" in Chinese.  Around half of them flat out said that you cannot say "nerd" in Chinese, but must borrow the English word.  Roughly another quarter mentioned shūdāizi ("bookworm"), or variants thereof, while another quarter listed all sorts of colorful terms meaning — more or less — "fool; blockhead; dolt; dunce; dullard; simpleton; numskull"; etc.), none of which are really comparable to "nerd".  I'll just list a few of the more interesting Chinese terms of the latter sort...

Much more at the link, including the awareness among native Chinese speakers of the nerd/geek distinction (and familiarity with this Venn diagram).

IN THE COMMENTS: Earnest Prole said:

For a subtler definition of nerd see this Venn diagram. 

"Language change across the lifespan."

"One theory, anyhow...."

"Jerky 'sex scion' cops to Central Park lewdness."

Hard to read headline. You have to figure out that "cops" is a verb.

(I think this is what they mean by "crash blossoms" over at Language Log.)