Last night my little friends and I went to hear a talk at the student center by the man who started PostSecret, I hadn't really heard of it before hand (sounds like a deoderant) and I was just like "oh, people mail him secrets, how fun, and sometimes they probably make them up and it's kind of like Found Magazine!" So it was weird to start with because we were surrounded by undergrads (and I know, I know, some of my best friends are undergrads, but undergrads at Covenant aren't so much undergrads because there is no grad school, we are the real students at Covenant. And I know there are probably decent kids here, too, but I think most of the ones last night were just there because of the All American Rejects song "Dirty Little Secret", which apparently used some of these "secrets" in its music video.) Anyway, the man started talking and it was like instant awkwardness, although I couldn't put my finger on why I felt that way for awhile. At the beginning all I knew was that it reminded me of being in chapel. A man was on stage, talking to me informally, but preaching just the same, trying to give me meaning in my life. I didn't want meaning, I wanted to hear the funny stories. I was quite surprised to hear how seriously he took everything, and I realized that my awkwardness came from the fact that he was completely up front, there was no irony, no cynicism, and no guard. Which is kind of like exposing yourself in public. I appreciate nudity, but it's still weird when it's in front of a crowd of people. The secrets, too, I was expecting something else, they read like Hallmark cards, bad Hallmark cards, and everyone says the same thing "I'm insecure" "I don't like myself" "I cry while having sex" (okay, all of them don't say that, but you get the idea). Now I don't know why I like this, but I can't take that, but they're different in my mind. So we got through the heartwarmingness and the emo-ness and it all just seemed very preachy. The man was like, look secrets, now I'm going to tell you what to get out of it. And I believe in the wholeness of humanity and the need to know other people, yes, yes I do, probably more than he does, but I don't think this is the way to get it.
Afterwards my roommate and I were talking about the whole idea of it, people giving secrets to someone they don't know and will never know. She pointed out that people have been doing this for years, it's called Confession. I said I didn't like it for kind of the same reasons I feel weird about Confession. Why are these people giving their secrets to strangers; where are their friends and families? The man talked about how this is helping us to realize the humanness of people, how we are all the same and all in this together. I think that is so important, and that's why I love the Christopher Harold Cleveland Game and all of those Sunday afternoons in the Tower Room when we would talk about God and our lives and each other and we would realize we were all human and all in this together and hey, God exists. But I think we should talk about it, not tell secrets about it.
My semester has been mainly composed of contemplating transitivity, and by contemplating I mean beating my head against the wall and the table because I can't think of the words I want to. My current problem is that I want to write about wacked out transitivity alternations for my sociolinguistics paper, but I can't really think of any, but my brain tells me that they are out there somewhere. So last night I sat in the livingroom staring into space and writing down lists of words that basically read like this:
it makes
it takes
on the make
make it
...
yeah, I have a feeling that there is something in some dialect that turns a transitive verb into an intransitive verb. I mean, there are things like "I drove (a car)" and "I gave (money, i.e. donated)" and "I bought (stocks)" and those have an understood object, but those aren't non-standard. I want to find something like that that is used only in non-standard dialects. Like if "I made" meant "I made pie" . . . or something, if "she watches" meant "she watches television." Kind of like you can say "I wash" and you mean dishes, in a certain context: "I washed, she rinsed, he dried." But I guess the fact that it has an understood object means it is still transitive. Which ruins that theory completely. I guess I am thinking of verbs switching from straight transitive to something like "eat" where they can be transitive or intransitive. But then there are verbs like "lay" that switch completely, "I laid the dress on the bed" vs. "I laid on the bed." and "raise" "I raised the flag" "The bread raised." (I just want to note here, on this topic, that I once almost convinced a group of people that the past tense of dive is "dave".) So what I am thinking of does exist to an extent. There's also the alternation in Pittsburghese where "leave" means "let" and "let" means "leave", examples stolen from Wikipedia: "Leave him go outside”; “Let the book on the table.” So that's something too. Really, I just love love love non-standard verbs. I want to used them all.
(hmm, that was a typo there, but I'm just going to leave it. It fits.)
So tired, but making progress. "Beat" isn't even listed as a verb in the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), but I found the Dictionary of Smoky Mountains English, co-authored by a professor from our own linguistics department and it was there: "beat: intransitive verb To win." Ha. Now I have to find similar verbs. What other verbs would work this way:
I beat them so I won.
I beat.
It's like using a verb referring to the process as a verb referring to the result. And when I think of it, most result verbs can be used transitively and intransitively: I burn it, it burns, but that's different because there the object is becoming a subject. In this they both have the same subject. Uuugh. Man, it's driving me crazy, got to do more research.
Also, I found another amazing linguistics blog today: literalminded.wordpress.com. It's by a man who has a degree in linguistics, but he's writing about linguistic ideas in everyday life, in the way his two sons talk, in things people say on the news and at the doctor's office. It's like all the everyday stuff from Language Log, only more personal and with only one author.
I have a grammatical construction, and I know that it is part of some dialect of American English, but I don't know which one and I need to find out. The construction is like this:
"The team beat."
That's it, "beat" used like "won." Now I know I've heard something like this before, but I don't know where. Right now I am thinking it is from a Southern possibly Appalachian dialect, but until I figure out which it is I can't elicit more such verbs from the native speakers via a finely crafted linguistic survey. And I can't write my paper.
Linguistics and I are having good times this semester. I was going to post the finely crafted handout I made for my class presentation on Monday, which was a beautiful example of syntactic argumentation, but alas, the darn computer lost it. Thankfully it was after I had printed it out for everyone in class, though. I love syntax, it makes me so happy. It's like chocolate. Hopefully I will continue to love it for a good many years so I can become a great syntactician, which is kind of like a magician, but with more magic.
I am also taking History of the English Language (which the prof keeps abbreviating as "HEL") and American Dialects, both of which are rocking awesome. I am also drinking coffee in Ashley Saturday's room right now.