Linguistic Interfaces

Jan. 11, 2012 at 11:30pm with 208 notes

Reblogged from npr

npr:

Beef Erupts Over Crossword Guru’s Hip-Hop Slang Clue : The Two-Way
According to some, Shortz took a false step with this past Saturday’s puzzle, when he included a clue steeped in hip-hop slang. The clue asked for a 5-letter word that means “Wack, in hip-hop.”

Things I learned from this debate:
Somewhere out there is a crossword whose answers include “ILLIN,” and my pen itches for it. Any such crossword deserves my respect. Kudos to The New York Times, and to Will Shortz, for helping to modernize the form.
Meaning is malleable. We mould it to fit our needs, and the needs of context, be it sentential or sociocultural.
Crossword clues can be paradoxical: simultaneously narrowing and widening the semantic reach of a word or phrase. The narrowing, of course, is by virtue of its very writtenness, its usually strategic hint. Widening occurs when the puzzle-maker and -doer are on different frequencies, due to a divergence of lexicons and/or milieux. In the above picture, for example, clue #39 (“Fix”) presents some difficulty because the doer must guess the grammatical category of the word as intended by the maker. Is it a verb or noun? We assume verbality, but can we truly be sure? Part of the maker’s skill is to write enough ambiguity into a crossword so as to up its difficulty; part of the doer’s skill is to land on the maker’s page, to ride the maker’s wavelength. The onus is on both.
Private quarrels become public on the internet. Okay, this point was relearned. What started as an e-mail exchange quickly reached Gawker, NPR, The Times, The New York Post, Tumblr… Yikes.
Research is important. When citing references in an argument of currency, make sure they are current. It doesn’t hurt if your sources are legitimate and alive. In this instance, I wouldn’t deem lexicographers to be legitimate sources, especially ones named Robert L. Chapman and Tony Thorne, who, methinks, are not considered a part of the hip-hop community. This point harkens back to an earlier post of mine, which discussed @everyword and the inherent limitations of dictionaries. If you cite dictionaries as references in a slang case, are you not also complicit in its institutionalization, and therefore restriction, of accepted meaning?
The hashtags #firstworldproblems and #whitepeopleproblems are applicable to many situations.

Beef Erupts Over Crossword Guru’s Hip-Hop Slang Clue : The Two-Way

According to some, Shortz took a false step with this past Saturday’s puzzle, when he included a clue steeped in hip-hop slang. The clue asked for a 5-letter word that means “Wack, in hip-hop.”

Things I learned from this debate:

Somewhere out there is a crossword whose answers include “ILLIN,” and my pen itches for it. Any such crossword deserves my respect. Kudos to The New York Times, and to Will Shortz, for helping to modernize the form.
Meaning is malleable. We mould it to fit our needs, and the needs of context, be it sentential or sociocultural.
Crossword clues can be paradoxical: simultaneously narrowing and widening the semantic reach of a word or phrase. The narrowing, of course, is by virtue of its very writtenness, its usually strategic hint. Widening occurs when the puzzle-maker and -doer are on different frequencies, due to a divergence of lexicons and/or milieux. In the above picture, for example, clue #39 (“Fix”) presents some difficulty because the doer must guess the grammatical category of the word as intended by the maker. Is it a verb or noun? We assume verbality, but can we truly be sure? Part of the maker’s skill is to write enough ambiguity into a crossword so as to up its difficulty; part of the doer’s skill is to land on the maker’s page, to ride the maker’s wavelength. The onus is on both.
Private quarrels become public on the internet. Okay, this point was relearned. What started as an e-mail exchange quickly reached Gawker, NPR, The Times, The New York Post, Tumblr… Yikes.
Research is important. When citing references in an argument of currency, make sure they are current. It doesn’t hurt if your sources are legitimate and alive. In this instance, I wouldn’t deem lexicographers to be legitimate sources, especially ones named Robert L. Chapman and Tony Thorne, who, methinks, are not considered a part of the hip-hop community. This point harkens back to an earlier post of mine, which discussed @everyword and the inherent limitations of dictionaries. If you cite dictionaries as references in a slang case, are you not also complicit in its institutionalization, and therefore restriction, of accepted meaning?
The hashtags #firstworldproblems and #whitepeopleproblems are applicable to many situations.