Professor Vanman, Facebook, and stress

Stress is a good thing.

Perhaps that needs some qualification: stress is a good thing in the appropriate context and  to an appropriate level. In a situation that calls for Fight or Flight, a surge of cortisol makes you fight harder or longer and run further or faster. But inappropriate levels of stress can bring a Fight-or-flight situation to the boil. If the stuff of 21st century life ratchets up the stress even before the stressee has to deal with a trying situation, Fight or Flight may become the default options – rather than, say, compromise, reasoning, counting to ten, backing-down, doing something else, clarification ...

<digression>
(That's a good one; it tends to crop up, for some reason. with respect to Northern Ireland. In the early days of the Good Friday Agreement the IRA kept asking for it. And now, in what one hopes (vainly) will be the dying days of the Brexit shenanigans...

<meta_digression>
(to use an arguably-Irish-based term, [and you can check out the other possibilities here])
</meta_digression>

... it has cropped up again as what Mrs May hopes to get over the EU's possible enforcement of The Backstop [a whole 'nother diet of worms])
</digression>

... or whatever. Sometimes taking the hit and then sending a sweary text to an innocent bystander does the job.

That was the stress relief I used the other day after  the <expletive_deleted> machine dispensed The Wrong Ticket. [In fact it had dispensed what I asked for, an Off-Peak Single, rather than what I wanted – an Off-Peak Return. Garbage In Garbage Out.

Back at the ranch, I logged in to the National Rail site, fearing that my mistaken order might be preserved for posterity as a Favorite. and while I was there I let off a bit more steam on their Feedback form:

<feedback>
The Favorites feature is counter-intuitive at best, and probably useless. My "Favorite" journey (which I haven't done for years, and was never a Favorite – I did it 2 or 3 times) is Reading-Swindon. I tried to remove this, but can't.

I wanted to change my Favorites because yesterday I accidentally ordered a single when I wanted a Return – and I wanted to avoid this option popping up in future.

Surely it's not beyond the wit of a web developer ...

<free_advice>
(I'll tell you for free: it'd be easy)
</free_advice>

 ... to have a check-prompt such as this: "Are you sure you want a single, when you could have a return for the same price? There's surely no downside to leaving your options open.")

But, returning to the Favorites list, it should have checkboxes and buttons for Remove and Add. I can't think how any developer could FAIL to offer these simple options.

</feedback>

On the bus home from the station, I  picked up a copy of Metro. which is worth every penny of its cover price (non-Londoners note: it's free). My eye was caught by an article with the headline Does a Facebook Diet Work? – based on some research led by the splendidly named Professor Vanman. It was probably too much to hope that his first name might be Dwight (geddit? or rather  geddit?).

I did some research (naturally the Metro article gave no clue), and found that the study in question was done at the University of Queensland nearly a year ago.

“People have long reported in other research that Facebook can make them feel bad about themselves or that it stresses them. Many people quit Facebook permanently because of it. Others take ‘Facebook Vacations’, in which they either deactivate or quit Facebook for a few days, weeks, or even months,” Vanman told PsyPost.

“Our research shows that ‘quitting’ Facebook for just five days is enough to reduce one’s levels of the stress hormone cortisol. The control group, who didn’t give up Facebook, did not show this.”

But there's a catch. Professor Vanman (not Dwight, I'm afraid, but Eric) goes on:

“We also found, however, that people who were instructed to give up Facebook for 5 days were less satisfied with their lives. Many were openly happy when the study was finished because they could return to Facebook,”...

[I]t could be that being off Facebook for the first few days reduces stress, but, the longer one feels like he or she is missing out, cortisol starts to increase again. We also don’t know if this would apply to giving up other social media like Twitter or SnapChat. We suspect these effects aren’t unique to Facebook.”

The Metro article sums up with a quote from another of the University of Queensland researchers: "There may be a sweet spot in terms of time spent on social media".

Moderation in everything: sounds about right. But where there's a catch (there may be a downside to total abstinence) there's often a counter-catch (rebuttal). The PsyPost article reporting on the study was dated 1 April 2018.

That's all for now

b

<noticed_in_passing>
PS Prize for  inappropriate register-selection in a translation
At the end of what was  on the whole a rather good mini-series (Manhunt aired recently on ITV) a bereaved father speaking in fairly good but hesitant English, when told  that his daughter's death could have been avoided but for a simple  bureaucratic slip on the part of a team investigating an earlier murder, says with a Gallic shrug  "Mistakes get made".  

Surely not. "People make mistakes" or the less fluent "One makes mistakes" (echoing a construction with on), or the rather better "Everyone makes mistakes".... But the extremely colloquial medio-passive ...

<ducking_and_covering>

(technical grammar knowledge Best Before November 2009, when I last taught) 

</ducking_and_covering>

 ...seems to me most unlikely... 

<clarificatory_ps>
(not wrong, but too right).
<clarificatory_ps> 

.... 

</noticed_in_passing> 

Update 2019.03.15.15:30 – Added inline PS.

Be'ind the harras

My attention to words that include the string *AR* has brought to my attention (not that it was ever totally unfocused, rather that I now have done a bit of relevant browsing  in dictionaries) a word (or group of associated words) that points to an ongoing change in pronunciation. And there is a coincidental surge in that word's frequency of use, starting with Harvey Weinstein  and ending (for the time being, though the boor is always with us) with Damian Green. No prizes for guessing that the mot du jour is  harass.

The dictionary I use for my daily grind (the Sisyphean sonorants book) is the Macmillan English Dictionary  (more by historical accident than for any actual preference). It is happy to recognize two stress patterns for this word, both with British English vowels and with American English vowels:

And the Cambridge English Dictionary is equally accommodating, although it gives only two audio examples:

And the two audio snippets are in line with the (mistaken)  view that stress on the second syllable is in some sense American: the "UK" one is is /'hærǝs/; the "US" one is /hǝ'ræs/.

The Oxford Dictionaries site goes one step further, favouring (in its order – which echoes the order that the Cambridge English Dictionary specifies for the US pronunciations) the version with iambic stress (dit-dah):

On the page that calls up a specifically US definition, the same site points to the move:

(Note that this is on the American English site: the prejudice against the iambic stress is felt on both sides of the Atlantic.)

I remember a note in a VIth form text book that said that Shakespeare stressed the word aspect iambically.  I imagine this would be confirmed in David Crystal's The Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation.

I wonder if that's the way harass is going (though in reverse: aspect => aspect, but harass => harass).

But we are in the twilight world in the midst of the change, so that in a single TV interview (which I can't track down right now, but which I heard yesterday, honest) the two stresses are both used: Kate Maltby says /'hærǝs/ while Laura Kuenssberg says /hǝ'ræs/.

But in the words of Tom Lehrer, Christmas time is here by golly. Gorra go.

b
PS: Some clues:

• In disarray, she'll claim me a famous introduction. (4, 2, 7)
• After Tom Jones, trifled (with emotions, perhaps). (7)

Update: 2018.04.30.15:30 – Added PS

PS: The answers: CALL ME ISHMAEL and FLIRTED

Putting the emPHAsis on the wrong sylLABle

My attention was caught the other day, for a number of reasons, by this tweet:

 

Chief among my reasons was that I can't see a rule without wanting to break it or prove it wrong. 

<autobiographical_note>

A simple example is the new paper-towel dispenser where my choir rehearses. The instructions end Pull down with both hands. When I'm alone (natch – I'm not that badly house-trained) I take great pains – and it's not easy – to do it with only one hand.

</autobiographical_note>

Another reason was that I didn't understand the tweet (without the context of reading the article – which I didn't have time to do). But I have since read the article and all is – relatively, considering the quality of the article (not a gem, in the Clarity Stakes) – clear.

The link was to a Business Insider article (my quotations are all from this article, but I can't be bothered to be my normal linkorrhoeic self) presented on a secondary site. So I clicked through to the original: before charging at it like a bull at a gate I should make sure  the advice was coming from the horse's mouth, at the risk of mixing my metaphors.

That picture of some sort of water-ice was followed by the echolalic (is that a word? Well it is now) question

To which my answer would probably be, I thought:

YES YES

But, more to the point, who was the you in their question? What is Business Insider's target readership? From the title I had guessed that it was some sort of business journal; but the tone of the article suggested that it was an ESOL resource, for use in what is unfortunately known as GBE (General Business English).
                                      
And it goes on:

Erm... not so much.

But if the target audience was ESOL students, my feelings of affront and assumed condescension were  hardly appropriate.

There were 12 key words, rather than the promised 11. Some early reader had presumably pointed out that 11 was an oddly arbitrary number, and you can chalk one more up for deadline-pressure.

Two of the words discussed (comptroller and supposedly) had nothing to do with stress; come to that, it's not easy to discern what they did have to do with. As a native speaker of English, I have never knowingly used the word comptroller. If this is a teaching resource, the students have my sympathy.

Other key words dealt with mispronunciations that I have never heard, such as

I suppose an ESOL student might meet banal for the first time and wonder whether it sounds like anal or canal. And here I'm tempted to recommend a  reference work of some kind, perhaps this.

<rant type="Is it worth repeating? You must be as bored of hearing it as I am of saying it.">
The usual. These "sounds like" 'transcriptions' do more harm than good. The arguments against teaching and using the tiny subset of IPA characters needed for teaching English are either trivial or vacuous or both. (One of the fuller rants is here.)

ELT teachers, arise: set your students free!
Use IPA symbols
/ju: nəʊ ɪt meɪks sens/

</rant>

And some of the words are only incidentally involved in getting stress wrong:
This, for example, misses a trick:

The extra syllable doesn't happen because of the faulty stress. I  imagine it happens by false analogy with words such as devious (and other less similar-sounding -<glide>ous words such as impervious or extraneous).

But maybe I'm wronging the article by assuming that the focus is stress.  It just says mispronunciation; and I'm only obsessing about stress because of the original tweeter's confusion. Incidentally, I originally thought the problem was just AE vs BE: the standard AE stress on sorbet is on the second syllable, so bold does mark stress in this:

Many say "sher-bert," though there's no second "r" — not even a silent one. It's not to be confused with "sorbet" (sor-bay)

It's not so clear with this though:

Most people add an extra syllable to this word. It is pronounced "tri-ath-lon" not "tri-ath-a-lon."?

Does anyone add an extra syllable like this? It's reminiscent of the childish interpolation of extra vowels to avoid tricky consonant clusters, but I've never heard any UK adult do it. And in any case, does anyone NOT stress the second syllable in that word? (I'm drawn to AE/BE explanations because the website in question is registered in Scottsdale, Arizona.)

Anyway, the bottom line: the article strikes me as slapdash and ill-thought-out. If it's meant for ESOL students, they deserve better. If it's meant for anyone else, I can't imagine what they'd get out of it or why they'd read it.

b

PS And a couple of clues:

• Janitors take back control of surrounding vehicles – (10)
• Carnival exhibit all at sea – (5  6)
  
  

Update: 2018.05.22.15:25 – Corrected letter count for second clue(!)

Update: 2018.09.23.11:20  – Crossword answers: CARETAKERS, AFLOAT

The end of the affair (stress on foreign words, part 2)

The other three words I had sur l^ea planche^r (a metaphor that will become relevant in the fulness of time: – avoir du pain  sur l^ea planche^r ≅ have work to do, have one's work cut out  [at the risk of confusing the baker with the tailor]) were

• Medici 
• Wallander
• /`mama/ (more likely /`mʌmʌ/)

Medici

I forget the context; it may have been the first half of a Sky Arts programme about The Eagles. An American referred to someone as "a sort of 20th-century Medici" (a lavish patron of the arts). The nationality is relevant, because I often notice that speakers  of American English tend to be more sympathetic (or even respectful) of foreign words' pronunciation. I imagine this is related to there being so many 1st/2nd/nth-generation immigrants there.

Anyway, he stressed Medici correctly, rather than using the common (British) anglicization Medici. The machine generating the sub-titles really went to town on this one, calling to mind the saying

To err is human, but if you want a real SNAFU use a computer

This latter-day Medici became a meta-chief.

Wallander

I can't work up much enthusiasm to write about this  travesty –  the abuse of word-stress (by several if not all the characters, as well as the BBC continuity people, whom I mistakenly gave the benefit of the doubt) should have warned me not to get my hopes up. There's two hours of my life that I'm not going to get back. For the record, stress is on the second syllable –  but you already knew that, didn't you, from the original sub-titled series.

/`mama/

If I'd seen the word mentioned in the salutation of each of the letters in  Love from Boy: Roald Dahl's Letters to his Mother that Radio 4 serialized recently I wouldn't have suspected an anachronism. Each letter began with what I thought must be 'Dear mama' (given the period and context – pre-war (in the first selection, at least) letters home from a boy at a boarding school). But I did some checking here and found that mamma was indeed stressed on the first syllable; his contemporaries would have written to Dear Mama, but young Roald would indeed have said /`mama/.

L'envoi

But what about that pain sur l^ea planche^r? Well, in last night's Cav&Pag (on BBC 4) I tuned in a bit late. In her intermezzo (as it were), between Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci (the new Covent Garden modern-dress production) even the lovely Clemmy made Cavalleria rhyme with the English cafeteria – which was strangely appropriate, as the setting featured a panificio (bakery) .

But what made my metaphor particularly appropriate was that the first scene I saw (tuning in, as I said, a few minutes late) featured Santuzza singing and Lucia kneading dough. It wasn't yet du pain, and it wasn't on a planche^r (which I suppose is the board that a baker loads with loaves before putting a batch in the oven) – rather on some kind of work-surface; close enough, though.

On with the motley, as someone once said.

b

PS
And it's been a while since I gave you a clue.

Withdrew endorsement of researchers first, then called to mind. (7)

PPS
And I almost forgot  this:

Update: 2016.08.26.10:40 – Added PPPS, and added explanatory phrasing (they're not repairs exactly, just avoidance of infelicities) in red.

PPPS OK, time's up on that clue: REVOKED.

Update: 2018.02.15.09:40 – Corrected misremembered idiom (courtesy of Twitter:

)

stress on fo'reign words

Some time ago (a little over two years ago, in this post) I wrote this:

In my youth I spent a few months selling magazine subscriptions, as mentioned in a previous post. ... 

One of the English titles that I had for sale was Motor Sport. So  into my fairly competent spiel (I had learned the necessary Spanish off pat) I dropped these three totally unrecognizable syllables: /məʊtəspɔ:t/. The Spanish for 'Motor Sport' included an /r/ sounded before the epenthetic vowel that precedes the outlandish^‡ consonant cluster /sp/. 

‡  Outlandish, that is, at the beginning of a word.

In my transcription I overlooked what may be a crucial point: in English, stress is on the first syllable; the Spanish is /mɔ`tɔr.es`pɔrt/.

Of late I've been noticing cases of mistaken stress, sometimes occasioning further phonological mistakes. In no particular order they are

• Boris
• Karel
• Roland Garros

Boris
There's a problem here. In Russian an o in an unstressed syllable is reduced to something a lot more central; I know no  Russian, but I think of this sound like the Portuguese /ɐ/ (and don't get me started on people who  overpronounce Portuguese as though it were Castilian Spanish: that's OK for Brazilian Portuguese, but in Continental Portuguese it's a sure sign of foreignness). So English speakers are stuffed either way. Putting the stress on the first syllable is wrong; but if you do put the stress on the second syllable then the o has to change – resulting in a noise that is going to be simply unintelligible to other speakers (either of English or of Russian).

Karel
This is a related problem. My taiji teacher's husband, Czech by birth, has this name. Many English speakers (myself included) pronounce this as we would say Carol (which at one time was optionally male...

<autobiographical_note>
... which reminds me of a Carroll Gibbons 78rpm record in my father's collection  – on the Brunswick label, I seem to remember. On the air is the one tune I remember from it. The balding pianist on the jacket was obviously a man. (Aha – faulty memory, it must have been an LP, with a jacket like that; and come to think  of it the Brunswick 78 may have been The Little Fiddle

Oh what a tangled web we... trawl(?)

When first we practice to recall. 

as wossname so nearly said).
</autobiographical_note>

...).

But stress is on the second syllable of Karel. Some students, noticing this, adopt that stress (as in some way "better") . However , they can't keep themselves from enforcing the English phonological rule that requires unstressed syllables (with a few exceptions, notably /ɪ/^PPS) to be reduced to /ə/. So they say /kə`rel/ which is wrong in spite of their assiduous striving towards linguistic purity.

Roland Garros

PS: Aha, that was it

The BBC, like most English speakers, uses the anglicized /`gærɒs/. But MrsK often prefers the Eurosport coverage – which exposes the viewer to advertisements aimed at a wider audience. The sponsor of the French Open (whose name, the marketing department will be disappointed to hear, escapes me) regularly announced "Longines,  proud sponsor of Roland Garros".

But here's the thing: they assigned the correct stress to Garros, but at the expense, ...

<digression type="sophomoric"> 

as with "Karel" [vs, as they used to say in Latin (vide supra="see above")
at the risk of sending musicians into a frenzy of page turning (volta subito). #BouBoumTsh ]

</digression>

 ... of reducing the /a/ to /ə/.  And, to compound the injury, they didn't change the stress on "Roland", indeed they made no attempt at all to disguise their obvious feeling that this was an Anglo-Saxon name: /`rəʊlənd/ – "demmed Frenchies", as the Scarlet Pimpernel might have said.

Is that the time? I'll wrap this up another day.

b

Update:2016.06.06.17:00 – Added picture

Update:2016.06.07.12:05 – Added PS

PS re Boris
Another bit of autobiog: I first became aware of this when I was rehearsing with a balalaika player who wanted me to adopt the name 'Boris', and as it happens one of the tunes we played was Korobeiniki (neither of whose os makes an o-like sound). I was reminded of this by a recent radio programme that used the soundtrack of the GAME BOY game Tetris (which, I'm obviously not the first to discover, is the same tune).

Update:2016.06.07.16:30 – Added PPS

PPS
I just remembered that I wrote this snippet about five years ago – for the forerunner of When Vowels Get Together, but at a time when my vaulting ambition extended to all  vowels everywhere. I've brushed it up a bit (but left the period detail – notably the reference to ol' red eyes):

Unstressed i is regularly – in Received British English (RBP) – pronounced /ɪ/. But in many variants, particularly ones with Estuarine tendencies, /ə/ is used –(especially in words that already have a stressed /ɪ/). For many speakers, for example, Tony Blair was the /praɪm 'mɪnəstə/, with the second i of minister reduced to /ə/. 

Also, even in people who think of themselves as speakers of RBP,  this reduction may occur: demonstrations may, for example, be accompanied by acts of /'sɪvəl dɪsə'bi:djəns/, although those speakers, if asked 'How do you pronounce C-I-V-I-L?' would say /'sɪvɪl/ (possibly adding /əv kɔ:s/).