And Sometimes Y
I must confess that I'm not always such a big fan of Russell Smith. I've given up reading his style column in the Globe and Mail because my eyes hurt so much from the excessive rolling that tends to occur whenever he says something ridiculous or pretentious. And I still can't get over that time he confessed in print that he pays $35 a pair for his underwear, which he has specially ordered from Europe. And the fact that his mother used to dress him in sailor suits as a kid, and that he loved it. I have to really control my urges to wanna just beat the crap outta him. But the pompous little aesthete is a very talented writer, who truly has a passionate love of words and language (though I do wish he would use his talent to write about something other than the rich trendy people living in Toronto, but that's another post).
And now Mr. Smith has harnessed his love of words and language into a delightful and eclectic radio program on CBC Radio One called And Sometimes Y. The program runs from June 27th to August 26th, and I've only managed to listen to one of his shows, but thankfully some of the conversations have been archived online, so you can listen to them at your leisure. The show that I managed to listen to was Episode 5, The Edge of Language. Here's an intro to that episode:
What is language for, and how does it work? Most of the time, we use it as a tool for communication, of course. Sometimes, we enjoy it for its poetry, its rhythms and rhymes etc. Most of us stop there, but a few daring explorers and experimenters try to break new ground beyond the conventional limits. Can these people offer us new and useful ideas about how we talk to each other? (Or not? Perhaps what they do is just weird...)
Russell interviewed Christian Bök, author of Eunoia, a unique book of poetry in which each chapter of the five-chapter book is focused on a specific vowel. Russell also talks to Darren Wershler-Henry, co-creator of The Apostrophe Engine, which is basically a computer-generated poetry-maker. Other interesting subjects include Christian Bök discussing his plans to translate a poem into a genetic sequence, and with the help of scientists actually create a living embodiment of a poem which would actually grow in a petrie dish. Fascinating!!
On each program Russell plays a game called Word Nerd with his guests, which is great fun to listen to. An example of this is The Robertson Davies Challenge: It’s based on a kind of lexicographical in-joke, which is that books written by Robertson Davies cannot be used as evidence that a word is still in fashion, because Davies made a habit of incorporating archaic words into his writing. The game is to find difficult words in a Robertson Davies novel, read the sentence, and get your opponent to guess what the author was on about. It's sort of reminiscent of the old BBC radio word quiz shows I used to listen to on CJRT when I was a teenager. Does anyone remember the show Just A Minute? It's still going on!
I'm going to try and listen to this Saturday's show, Men versus Women, which will be a study of the differences (or not) between the language of women and men. Here's Russell's take on the subject:
So novelists can easily pretend that they're someone else; that's what novelists do. But what if people are speaking in their own voices? Can we prove scientifically that they use the language differently? Well, researchers at Bar-Ilan University in Israel published a study on male and female writing in hundreds of texts and found that there were measurable differences in style: women tend to use more pronouns and men use more noun-modifiers. But when the professors tried to turn this data in to a formula and made a computer program which attempted to read a text and determine whether its author was male or female, the computer turned out to be accurate about fifty per cent of the time - about as accurate as flipping a coin.
