Got Gots? Maybe You Should Have Fewer…

The word got is ugly to say, hear and think about. Aurally, it starts with a hard G in the back of the throat and initiates a dropping jaw and a burst of air that is corralled by the tongue, which is stopped up against the mouth’s frontal roof. Ick. And it’s a selfish word, very possessive and grabby.

In most cases when we might feel compelled to use got, it could be dropped without losing the sentence’s meaning. If you say, “I have got to quit training for the triathlon because my cigarette keeps going out,” the word got is redundant, and should be avoided.

That is not the case if the have or has in question is contracted; in such cases, the got is required. One iconic example of this that resonates with old people is AOL’s signature greeting, “You’ve got mail!” It wouldn’t quite sound right if it said, “You’ve mail.” If it said, "You have mail," that would be fine, but might lack the implication of delight or celebration that the marketing team at AOL intended.

It can be used for emphasis in special cases like, “You have got to be kidding me,” but if it ends up on your page, ask yourself twice if it has got to be there.

The Dog Days of Summer: Named After a Star Canine

For most of us, the term “dog days of summer” needs no further explanation. In our mind’s eye we see an English bulldog lying on a patch of grass in the park, its eyes rolling back into its head and its once insouciant smile now a perplexed smirk as a foot-long pink tongue with black splotches lolls rhythmically in and out of its sagging maw.

But it is not for our fine furry friends that the dog days are named at all. It is for the rising of Orion in the final week of July and the first weeks of August just before sunrise along with his faithful dog, represented by the star Sirius, otherwise known as the dog star. This celestial pairing of Orion rising just before the sun was first noticed in North Africa and the Mediterranean, and something akin to the term "dog days of summer" began to appear in Egyptian and Roman writing in the centuries leading up to the Common Era.

While the view is decidedly different in the US, the timing of those days when you’re walking in cement shoes is identical in our part of the northern hemisphere, and we know it quite commonly by the term, "dog days of summer." We don’t see Orion do his morning routine from our vantage point, first heralding and then handing off the day to the sun, but we don’t really need to. We have our dogs. 

Cakewalk: a Great Word and a Quiet Revolt

Over the course of a week’s vacation in New Orleans, I ran across a mention of the Cakewalk dance, which as a word study is inspiring and depressing at the same time.

The Cakewalk grew out of the field antics of American plantation slaves who sought to entertain themselves by exaggerating the haughty promenade and effete strutting of their masters’ formal dances, which the house slaves would often observe and report back to the field hands. 

It grew to be a common distraction for the slaves, this sub rosa sarcasm, and while some plantation owners found the practice irksome, most found it as hilarious as the slaves did, only they by and large didn't understand that they were being lampooned. It was Jonathan Swift-level satire, with the delicious victory of the butts of the joke unaware that they were unwittingly laughing at themselves.

The slave owners would often hold competitions to see which of them owned the best “walker” as they were called. The dancers would strut and preen, prance and bow, doff their caps and wave canes; the winner would then be presented with a highly decorated cake, hence the name. Derived from the Cakewalk dance are several expressions that remain to this day, including, “piece of cake,” or “cakewalk” itself to describe something that is easily done, as well as “takes the cake.”

That America balanced her checkbook on the backs of slaves is one disgrace. That slave owners consumed without remittance not only their labor in the fields but also their leisure in music and dancing is another. That those same slaves were able to satirize their masters right under their noses with the Cakewalk is an act of genius, pride and sheer bravery.

The Stripper's Report Card: Twerks Well With Others

New Orleans is apparently the home of twerking, so it is no surprise that it remains a place where twerking can occur without a moment’s notice. Last night as my lady Debra and I toured through Frenchmen Street in New Orleans, a terrific brass band was playing on the corner of Frenchmen and Chartres. The pandemonium was near absolute as a passel of three college-age white girls made their ways to the front of the crowd and began dancing. It was the classic Neapolitan ice cream mix of a blond, a brunette and a redhead; Debra cast a glance at the ladies and of their high-riding blue jean cut-offs she said, “Those look like twerking shorts.” Not sixty seconds later, one of the gals assumed the position and the floorshow began.

Like a baboon in mating season she thrust her butt cheeks high, and with a Marilyn Monroe storm-grate-and-white-dress leg splay along with a tongue-lolling look over one shoulder, she issued gluteal gyrations that if harnessed could potentially mitigate the current energy crisis. The other two were soon to follow. Then came the fanny-slapping, there having been some division of labor pertaining to expertise, as the twerker was highly skilled, as was the slapper, part of whose responsibilities were lip curling and more tongue lolling, caricatures of a woman in the throes of sexual abandon.

But where does the word come from? As I mentioned previously, it seems to have originated in New Orleans. According to research by Katherine Connor Martin, head of US dictionaries at Oxford University Press, it bubbled up from the bounce music scene in New Orleans in the 1990s. Martin cites a first recorded instance in 1993 on a dance record by DJ Jubilee called Jubilee All in which he utters the line, “Shake baby, shake baby, shake, shake, shake… Twerk baby, twerk baby, twerk, twerk, twerk.” Shakespeare it ain’t, but DJ Jubilee’s cultural influence has grown, its most widely observed demonstration having been Miley Cyrus’s notorious performance at the 2013 VMA awards.

It is theorized to be a derivative of “work,” as in “work it,” an exhortation to ramp up dancing suggestiveness that has been a known usage going back to the disco era and perhaps before. It may also be a conflation of “twitch” and “work,” for obvious reasons. One of the women who joined Debra and me on our stroll through Frenchman Street said, “If I ever saw my daughter doing that there would be hell to pay.”

A similar reaction greeted Chubby Checker’s “The Twist” when it became popular in the late 1950s, and that ire has since subsided entirely. Somehow I doubt twerking will ever enjoy the same social acceptance, but who knows? Perhaps some number of years from now, grandmothers will be gathering on the nursing home porch and leaning on walkers for support, twerking and flashing decades-old tramp stamps and remarking as to which among them can still bring the thunder.

Persuade versus Convince: It's Not Just a Matter of Degree

Today’s snippet is the difference between persuade and convince, which at first sniff might appear to be virtually synonymic, but whose proper usages differ.

A good way to get a comfortable hold on these two rascals is to know that you’ll never be convinced if you won’t be persuaded, while you can be persuaded without being convinced: though not convinced it was a good idea, Bill was persuaded to try LSD.

One element of convincing is helping someone arrive at a conclusion as a result of evidence. That is not to say you can’t be convinced on flimsy evidence. Any one person’s certainty is never a marker of absolute veracity, so in order to be convinced, one need not be even remotely correct. Still, after a good round of hearty convincing, the convinced is in a state of unshakable assuredness.

Persuasion is a softer science. It is an appeal to reason, to a higher sense of mind and being. The persuader perceives herself as having achieved an understanding that would be beneficial to others, and she shares her vision of how to reach this state of opinion, activity or consciousness. It is a process of seduction, this persuading, an importuning that presumes your desire for personal betterment and presents the upside of a preferred decision or personal disposition.

Persuaded can be used euphemistically to describe torture or intimidation through the rhetorical device of understatement. You could say, “Skinny Joey persuaded the guy to pay up by mailing him a human finger.” However, if you were to say, “Skinny Joey convinced the guy to pay up by mailing him a human finger,” the element of rhetorical understatement is gone, and it becomes merely a statement of fact.

New Orleans Edition: Where Y'at?

I arrived in New Orleans yesterday and dragged my trumpet down to Frenchmen Street, fully prepared to have a teenager mop the floor with me on a street corner jam session. There was one such group; four trumpets, two trombones, sousaphone and drums, and all four trumpeters were younger than 20 and all four put my conditioning to shame. I drifted into a bar called 30 x 90 where a jam session was advertised. I was welcomed onto the stage and the drummer Gene, who was running the session, gave me exactly what The Grammar Dance was looking for as he called up the house band.

“I need the band up here. Where y’at?” Obviously, “where y’at” is a contraction of “where are you at,” itself a grammatical stubbed toe. It is a case of ending a sentence with a preposition, but more than that, the preposition is wholly unnecessary in the first place. “Where are you” suffices perfectly to convey the sense of the question. But how fun is that? The answer is not at all.

Imagine a cool-as-iced-tea bandleader taking the microphone and saying, “I need the band back up here. Where are you?” No sizzle whatsoever. That said, “where y’at” doesn’t stop there. It is additionally used as a general and polite inquiry as to one’s health and happiness at a moment of encounter. The geolocation component is of course negligible when “Where y’at” is used as a greeting. Why would you ask such a question when the person is standing right in front of you? Were the person being asked unaware of the dual sense of the greeting, she might say, “I’m on Austerlitz and Tchoupitoulas, you big ninny. Same as you.”

The idiomatic answer to the “Where y’at” greeting, provided all is well, is “Awrite,” a phonetic expression of the phrase “all right,” delivered in a drawl that is born of high humidity, warm temperatures and a lifetime of exposure to genuine friendliness.

The Nashville Edition: Y'all

It’s the first and for a while the only Nashville episode of The Grammar Dance, as vacation brings me to New Orleans tomorrow, which is one of America’s great repositories of regional grammar peculiarities. Until tomorrow evening though, I am in the land of y’all. Or rather, one of many lands of y’all, as y’all is a colloquial contraction whose reach continues to spread.

The breadbasket of y’all would have to be Texas, but its use remains heavy north to the Oklahoma panhandle and then moves eastward through Arkansas and Louisiana, straight through the deep south and into Florida, with heavy use still felt in Tennessee and across to the mid-Atlantic seaboard states. Its use peters out in Pennsylvania and drops off significantly northeast into New England and due north once you hit Missouri. By Minnesota, it’s pretty well gone, with western states like Nevada and Arizona carrying on a casual, uncommitted relationship with it.

As a part of speech, it is a second person plural pronoun, and when you consider that the proper version of the second person plural pronoun is simply you, perhaps there is a glaring hole in the potential expressiveness of our grammar. The plural form is identical to the singular form, and that strikes me as a missed opportunity for some additional color in the language. Y’all fixes that.

Though a traditionalist, I welcome y’all as a polite, inclusive and endearing means of addressing a group. It is interesting to note for the sake of comparison another second person plural American colloquialism that has its home in New York and New Jersey, youse, as in, “Do youse guys want to head down to Brooklyn tonight?”

So what’s the difference between y’all and youse? Not much, except in terms of mood and feel: y’all sounds like you’re about to get kissed whereas youse sounds like you’re about to get stabbed. There is a third one that for the most part has kept itself confined to its city of origin, and that is Pittsburg's dreadful yinz. It is my sense that yinz's hideousness will keep it right right where it is and there's nothing for the rest of us to worry about.