Irrenowned linguist A. Cephalous loves his obsolete adjectives and anarthrous occupational nominal premodifiers. However, he loves thinking about the blazing speed with which humans produce intelligible language even more. So how pleased is he to learn that Dutch linguist Peter Hagoort won the 2005 Spinoza prize, a.k.a. the "Dutch Nobels," for his work on neurobiological aspects of human linguistic competence? Very. Hagoort demonstrated that "people know the grammatical data about a noun approximately 40 milliseconds earlier than they [utter] the first syllable of a word." (With 40 milliseconds being such a frickin' long time, it's no coincidence that Hagoort works at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.) According to Hagoort's 1998 article in Science,
This knowledge includes information about the meaning of words, their syntactic properties (such as word class), and their phonological properties (such as their phonemes and syllable structure). All this information is stored in a component of long-term memory that is usually referred to as the mental lexicon. During speaking, the mental lexicon is accessed automatically at very high speed to select words that express the intended meaning, and to retrieve their syntactic and phonological properties....A central unresolved question concerns the orchestration in real time of the retrieval of the distinct types of linguistic knowledge required to produce fluent speech.
The answer, as I've already mentioned, is about 40 milliseconds. And that's for speaking. How quickly is it for writing? The fellows at the A. Cephalous Center for the Unscientific Study of Scientific Science Stuff decided to find out. One of the fellows, Sneed, scientifically imbibed 3 gallons of water. Another, Tommy, scientifically steered Sneed's hand into a gallon of water warmed, scientifically, to room temperature. Lady lab assistant Marsha measured how long it took before Sneed's sallow face performed the familiar contortions of persons seconds away from mighty micturations.
At this point the lab director, A. Cephalous himself, asked Sneed to remove his hand from the warm water and compelled him to confess to murdering by snickersnee the beloved office caricature, The Insolent Sailor, and informed him that he must also, scientifically, measure the speed with which he selected the appropriate words and retrieved their syntactic and phonological properties. The obliging Sneed--held captive by his busting bladder and the snickle A. Cephalous had slipped around his neck whilst removing his warm-watered hand--confessed to his morally dubious dastardly doings and begged to be unsnickled and unsnooled so that he might relieve the painful pressure of his bloated bladder.
A. Cephalous declined Sneed's request.
Snarling at his snickering former fellows, the snickled Sneed labored a lunge at his former fellows and much to mutual dismay nearly snapped his snickle. The snickle held but sad snarling Sneed's snooled neck did snap. His snobbish former fellows, saddened by the snapping of Sneed's snickled neck, quickly tired of disposing his detritus and decided to dedicate the day's remaining light to snuggling and snogging. Those few fellows without women with whom snuggling and snogging would be constant and consensual were to retire to the snoozing room, wherein snoozing, snoring and snooping on the snuggling and snogging of those with women would commence. Scientifically, of course.
Aaaaaaaaaand Scene!
The point of this exercise? An imitation of the alliterative mania of William Gass,* but also an Abishian attempt to write something not entirely nonsensical under artificial restraints. And damn did it not work. All this time invested compels me to press publish anyway, and so I will--but not before noting that there's a real correspondence between words which, in English, begin with "sn-" and what they signify. I've often found arguments about why certain sounds connote similarly but none of them have ever been all that convincing. I don't buy the brazen explanations gracing the pages of my linguistics books, but I've done little work on recent research, so maybe there's something new. To the library!
*Sample Gassian prose: "Poker for peanuts or pennies is not the same game as one with limitless stakes, and there are certain driving skills which come into play only at high speeds; so that even if there's a resemblance between walking a fallen log and crossing a piece of structural steel amidst the worries of work, wind, and altitude, the achievements are in no way the same, although, again, exhortations like 'careful to keep your balance' are in both cases appropriate and certainly appreciated." Gass always teeters between the grossly over-written and pitch perfection. I always wonder how often the first consonant sound of one word determines which will follow--and what effect that has on the meaning of his essays--as when, for example, he says of people who feel the need for therapeutic "creativity," who want "to pass as poets, to be called 'creative,' to fit themselves into a certain social niche, acquire an identity the way one acquires plants there's no time to tend or goldfish that can't be kept alive..." In that sentence alone, much less the rest of his corpus, we have "pass as poets," "called 'creative,'" "certain social niche," "way one," "time to tend" and "can't be kept." And almost every sentence he writes is written thus. I admire the playfulness of his prose--as above the fold discloses, I love little more than language play--and enjoy emulating it immensely. But I wonder whether what he's written writes itself to some extent, or whether what he's written first is thought and then is wrought. I don't know, but you no doubt know why Gass in short doses does please much more than Gass in manly morsels.
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