“fan base”

It’s gone completely viral. This is the 6th straight such case I’ve seen this week:

“PORTLAND, Ore. — Nate McMillan came to Portland in 2005 with a mission to rebuild the Trail Blazers into a Western Conference contender and repair the once-proud franchise’s tattered image with its adoring fan base.”

You can’t just say “fans” anymore. It’s “fan base” now. 

position open in Morocco

If I weren’t already happily employed at the American University in Cairo, I would jump on this. And so should you, junior faculty member/fresh Ph.D., if the job market hasn’t gone your way this year.

Job Opening: ASSISTANT/ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR in PHILOSOPHY

The position is open now to be filled by August 2012 at the latest.

The School of Humanities and Social Sciences has one new opening in Philosophy.

The candidates would teach undergraduate introductory philosophy courses as part of the University’s liberal arts curriculum. They would also teach graduate courses within both International Studies and Islamic/Religious programs – especially important is the ability to teach ‘Philosophy of Religion’. Applicants must have a Ph.D. at time of hire. Teaching experience is desirable, but newly graduated Ph.Ds are encouraged to apply. A working knowledge of Arabic, French, or other discipline-relevant language would be considered advantageous. Applications will be processed until the position is filled.

THE UNIVERSITY: Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane is an independent, public, not-for- profit, coeducational university committed to educating future citizen-leaders of Morocco and the world through a globally oriented, English-language, liberal-arts curriculum based on the American system. The university is composed of approximately 1,600 undergraduate and graduate students in a residential campus environment. The main campus of the university is located in Ifrane, a resort town in the Middle Atlas Mountains approximately 1 hour each from Fez and Meknes, and 2.5 hours from Rabat.

The university also has a branch in the commercial center of Casablanca with a focus on professional and executive programs. There are approximately 130 faculty members, about 40% of whom are international. For additional information about the university and its programs, please visit our website: http://www.aui.ma and http://www.aui.ma/shss.

APPLICATION PROCESS: Applicants are invited to submit a letter of application, Curriculum Vitae, and three letters of reference to:
Vice President for Academic Affairs Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane P.O.Box 104, Ifrane 53000, Morocco Tel: + (212) 535 86 20 25 Fax: + (212) 535 56 71 46 E-mail: shssfacultysearch@aui.ma

spam of the day

More of the same, with a bit of regression compared with yesterday:

“Dear sir,

Have a nice day!
We are from Dalian Zhongao International Co.,Ltd,China.We are specialty produce paraffin wax.
Any specification we can produce.In addition to this,we are produce fully refined paraffin wax,semi refined paraffin wax,liquid paraffin  and so on.

Product name:Fully refined paraffin wax
Price:FOB Tianjin USD 1280/Ton
Melting point:58-60
Color:white 
Appearance:board wax

And we are interested  in the possibility of further cooperation with your company, if you have any question,pls feel free to contact me,thanks!
Hope to hear from you as soon as possible.

—

Best wishes!

Lydia”

 

The paraffin melting point is a nice touch. I like to know all the gritty details before any large paraffin buy.

a more blatantly ridiculous story from Egypt

You’ve got to be KIDDING ME.

75 charged with murder in Port Said February 1 soccer riot

I’m happy to see some movement on the case. HERE.

However, I’m going to be extremely cautious before accepting that the people charged are the actual people responsible. Too many weird things have happened here in the past year.

wooden skyscrapers?

As long as they can fireproof them, I guess.

 

HERE.

“Lucy’s message from China”

The American University in Cairo has a pretty draconian spam filter on its email server. It’s harsh enough that I’ve missed at least one golden opportunity due to an important message being devoured at the wrong moment; now I’m more careful to check the spam box closely from time to time.

But in recent months, Chinese chemical merchants have somehow figured out a way to get through our filter. Each day, I receive anywhere from 2 to 7 of their messages.

I won’t repeat my earlier complaints that China ought to hire some culturally savvy young people to make their spam more plausible. My thinking was that China ought to do better, as an emerging global colossus. We’ll all be working for the Chinese in 20 years (I fully expect to spend my final years in China; they’ll be buying up Western academics just as the Western university financial bubble bursts).

Instead, today I find myself delighted by these chemical messages, and I may even start saving them to chart variations rather than deleting them. They have much to tell us about the unstated rules of English usage.

Consider the first part of today’s message:

“subject: Lucy’s message from China

Dear Sirs,

Have a nice day!

We can offer you chemical products. Let me introduce our company to you.”

What’s interesting here is that there is not even one grammatical mistake, and yet the English is completely bizarre. If you were teaching an English class and a student gave you this as a writing assignment, you’d have to think for a few minutes about how to correct them. (If it were a beginner’s class, you’d probably just let it slide, being happy that they hadn’t made any outright mistakes.)

What are the problems with the message? I can think of the following…

1. “Lucy.” We know the message is coming from China, and we know that most women in China do not have names such as Lucy, Lisa, Ella, and Emily. And yet, those are the sorts of names that are always used in these messages. It’s a delightfully naive attempt to seem familiar and unthreatening to the Anglophone reader. There’s also something a bit stereotypical about the names themselves. If you or I were faking a letter from a chemical-dealing woman, we’d never choose any of those names.

2. “subject: Lucy’s message from China.” When would this be an appropriate subject heading for an email? Answer: if you and I both knew someone named Lucy, if she were on a trip to China, if you had recently told me that you had received an email from her in China, and you were forwarding it to me as promised. What if I were to send someone an email called “Graham’s message from Egypt”? This sort of structure simply isn’t used for first person speech. (Maybe it is, in Chinese. Perhaps this is coming straight from Chinese usage; I know nothing of the language.)

3. “Dear sirs.” Not strictly incorrect, but the plural seems vaguely inappropriate here. You would use the plural when addressing a corporate body, not when spamming individual email accounts.

4. “Have a nice day!” Perfectly valid, except that we would never say this at the beginning of a conversation. It always comes at the end, and is used almost entirely in casual, semi-friendly interactions that are neither too close nor too distant. You wouldn’t say “Have a nice day!” in a business letter (it’s too informal for that), but you also wouldn’t say it to a friend or family member (it’s too empty for that). “Have a nice day!” would be said to someone you just chatted with in a friendly manner for 10 seconds at a supermarket but have no intention or expectation of ever seeing again in your life.

5. “We can offer you chemical products.” Again, this is completely correct in grammatical terms. But no one would ever say it. Why not? Hard to put one’s finger on it. It’s certainly a bit abrupt, as sales pitches go.

6. “Let me introduce our company to you.” This is the e-mail’s closest brush with bad grammar, but it’s really just slightly awkward rather than incorrect.

In a beginner’s English class you would have to give this email 100 points out of 100, because it does nothing wrong. But in an advanced English class, you’d have to give it a failing grade, because it is still completely inept in terms of usage.

And here’s what interests me. Grammatical rules and vocabularies change over time in any language. And we might think that the future of the English language will involve an infusion of foreign vocabulary and an increasing amount of pidgin grammar.

However, even if the vocabulary and grammar of English were to remain frozen in its current position, the language could still evolve into an almost unrecognizable form, simply through usage violations of the sort we see above.

And something else interests me. Let’s say a future scholar of the English language, 1000 years from now, were to run across the email from Lucy above. Most likely they would not be able to find anything wrong with it at all. I would imagine that Romans of the classical period would laugh their heads off at medieval Latin for much the same reason.

Barcelona conference link

On March 30 I’ll be speaking at the Choreography Conference in Barcelona. For details, click HERE. 

plausibility consultants still needed

If the Chinese would simply hire a few unemployed university graduates who are native speakers of English, they could avoid cultural/linguistic spam farces such as these:

“Dear Sir or Madam:
Good luck for every day! I’m so glad to hear that you need some chemical products. I confirm to give you a most reasonable quotation and I wish there would be a response from you as soon as possible.

Yours,
Sincerely.

Ella”

And this:

“Dear Sir,

This is Emily from Qingdao Aokai Chemical Co. ltd. we are specializing in producing chemical products. We glad to know that you need Perchloroethylene.”

boring bracket

I’ve paid less attention to this year’s college basketball season than to any season since 1977-78. But through faint peer pressure, I ended up having to fill out a tournament bracket in a pool of acquaintances anyway.

I was filling in the games one at a time, and was horrified when I ended up picking Duke to win the championship. What a lame, knee-jerk, casual sports fan sort of prediction. Worse yet, they’re not even going to win it.

Technically, the brackets aren’t frozen for another day or two. But I’ve drifted so far from my sportswriting days that I’m barely even a casual fan anymore, and feel too lazy to log in and fix anything. Take a busy personal and professional schedule and mix it with thousands of miles of distance from my home country, and you have the perfect recipe for a near-total collapse in sports knowledge over the course of a little more than a decade.

In fact, I just read Bill Simmons’ brilliant annual column on the 50 NBA players with the highest trade value, and hadn’t even heard of a few of those players. What’s next? Guys on the 2016 Olympic team that I’ve never heard of?