argotnaut

He didn’t really mean it to begin with.

(Original post)

I was both excited and wary when Andrew discovered that an Ethiopian restaurant a mere 3-minute walk from our house was going to be opening soon. My favorite food in the universe so close by! But what if they weren’t any good?

I peeked into their window every time we were near 50th and Division. Nothing seemed to be happening for weeks. Would they ever open? Was the universe just taunting me? And then a week or so ago, their big “Opening Soon” sign was gone. No! Opening a restaurant is tough…did something not work out?

Yesterday Andrew happened to see some people moving things in on the second floor of the building, and they told him that today was the big day they’d be opening! They had originally planned to move in on the first floor, but wound up moving upstairs. No wonder it looked deserted.

So we wandered down to Bete-Lukas a couple of hours ago for dinner. Right now, they only have a small sign a few doors down from Hawthorne Division, so it’s easy to miss. Maybe they’ll be doing something more obvious after they have everything running smoothly to their satisfaction.

Inside looks much nicer than the Ethiopian restaurants you may be accustomed to. The atmosphere is simple, bright, airy, and inviting. Nice enough for a dress-up date if you like, but not so fancy that you’ll feel awkward in your ratty summer clothes. This is Portland, after all.

We both couldn’t help noticing is that they have a mighty good-looking staff — is this some idealized Hollywood version of an Ethiopian restaurant? Will we find ourselves on some secret reality show next month?

But on to the moment I’d been waiting for: the Veggie Combo!

YUM! Very tasty, much to my relief! (Having a mediocre Ethiopian restaurant so close to my house would have been a special kind of torture for me.)

If you get a combo, one should be enough for two people, unless you’re both ravenous. We got out of there with dinner and an Italian soda for Andrew for about $14 and I still have leftovers for tomorrow’s lunch.

Since I am cooking impaired, I won’t try to describe the food in florid detail. Every Ethiopian place has a slightly different style, and every Ethiopian food fan has his or her own favorites, so you should check it out for yourself. As for me, I am going to be spending a lot of time there, especially because Andrew will be starting school soon and won’t be here for me to kick around. Er, get dinner from, I mean.

As we were paying the bill, they mentioned that we were their first customers. Yay! I’m not sure why I should be so excited by that, but I am. I’m a dorky Ethiopian food groupie and it’s kind of like being in the front row, I guess.

Collect ‘em and trade ‘em with your friends! This one is regarding the car dealership ad that told atheists to “sit down and shut up” (not to mention the statistical, generalizing, and group-lumping sins it committed):

“It’s just something that went by us,” said Kieffe, who does not attend church but considers himself “a Christian spirit.” “We’re obviously sorry that it offends a given segment who identifies themselves as atheist.”

Wow, did you see that thing? It went right by us and offended people! Didn’t even slow down! Good thing it had absolutely nothing to do with us!

Source: http://www.bakersfield.com/hourly_news/story/456451.html

Written collaboratively and presented to me by guests at my 20th vegetarian anniversary dinner (thanks, guys!):

Behold, the tofu, firm & white
Cold, or warm, or hot: but nice

O tofu! You sultry temptress!
Your scintillating whiteness moves me
Forward, as Ahab chased his whale

But then, there is the toasty tan
deep-fried, sesame seeds

Much more tasty, of course,
than common twigs and weeds.

Bliss unto the inky darkness
of wine & chocolate.

The word is curd, so soft, so smooth,
and never burred. Though when
it falls on the floor, it becomes
befurred and its silken beaniness
deferred.

I’m a tofu
you’re a tofu
he’s a tofu
she’s a tofu …
Wouldn’t you want to be a tofu too.
Be a tofu.
Eat yummy tofu.
Be a tofu.

Wow, it’s been a long time since I did a real post. These days, it seems that Blogging Is Serious and you have to have Something Important to Write About. Really, I just started this as an open letter to various out-of-town people . . . OK, truthfully, it was just for my sister and a few other people who apparently had a lot of time on their hands. Occasionally I’ll throw in something about linguistics or other things that I actually bother to think carefully about, but you probably shouldn’t expect too much of that sort of thing.

Nowadays I spend most of my interact-y time sharing links on Facebook and Google Reader. I had even toyed with the idea of completely dismantling this blog, but I just updated WordPress to 2.5 (due to various nasty critters going around), and the tidy new admin area makes me want to use it again. Still want to do a more minimal theme, though. Or will I carry through with my threat to build a text-only site from scratch?

So, let’s see. I took no classes last term. After all, it was last June that I graduated! I’ve just been sort of hanging around, working on various music and acting projects, volunteering for CFI (and their new Portland center — yay!), and really not feeling at all like a linguist. I was worried that I might not even want to go to grad school after all! But this term I’m taking Evolution of Language, and of course, that fixed those feelings.

And would you believe that PSU is finally going to have a PhD program in linguistics? I don’t have many details yet, but this might be a very exciting development for me. We shall see.

Even more exciting, a new Ethiopian restaurant is opening a mere 5-minute walk from me!

So, Andrew was all set to begin the M.A. TESOL at PSU, but the Friday before the term began, he decided to scrap that and study video production instead. He’s planning to get a second bachelor’s degree at the Art Institute here in Portland. And no one is even slightly surprised by this, least of all me. Well, the timing is mildly surprising, but that’s all.

It seems like there are other developments around here, but I can’t think of them at the moment, so I’m off to play with the themes.

I get tired of doing the usual blog thing and long to do it in some other way. Like making a very simple text-only blog, with lots of white space. Or subverting some other kind of software for blogging use, like, for example, the online task manager I’ve been experimenting with. Or how about blogging your dreams every day as though they were real life (for those of us who have the luxury of sleeping long enough to dream)? I might do that, but shoo, I’ll have to change all of the names to avoid public humiliation.

I love these non-native-speaker spam subject lines: “Erection for sexual activity.” What the hell else would you want it for? Better TV reception?

The headline of this article is no longer the same as the one that was displayed in my feed reader: “Hostage taker complained of lack of access to mental health care.” And I have to admit that my instant response to seeing that was to think for a second that the whole thing might have been staged. I mean, I doubt that it actually was, but still…I would not be at all surprised to find something like that going on in any of the candidates’ campaigns.

A recent email exchange following a lecture in my cognitive science class:

From: Lisa Brandt Heckman <*@*.com>
Date: Nov 26, 2007 1:35 PM
Subject: Thoughts on intransitive/transitive verbs
To: Thomas G. Dieterich < *@*.edu>

Hello,

Just a few thoughts that came up during today’s lecture that were a bit too long for class discussion:

“Kiss” and “hug” are transitive, but these are OK for me:

The newlyweds kissed.
We hugged.

At first I thought maybe there was an invisible “each other” hanging around there, in which case I should be able to plug in more “each other” verbs, BUT:

*The newlyweds punched.
*We hated.

Why is this? Are these just anomolous, or is there something else going on?

Also, it seems that there are a lot of verbs anymore (ha ha) that I consider to be transitive, but are being used intransitively. These are all sentences that I’ve seen in the past few years:

Please wait while your application processes.
The information will display on the screen.
The tab will highlight.

These make my skin crawl. Were these always intransitive, or is there a change underfoot? If so, I blame the prescription against passive construction — these all seem particularly suited to that.

LBH

—

From: Thomas G. Dieterich < *@*.edu>
Date: Nov 27, 2007 10:45 AM
Subject: Thoughts on intransitive/transitive verbs
To: Lisa Brandt Heckman <*@*.com>

Good for you to think of these examples! Verbs like /kiss /and /hug/ might be termed “reciprocal” verbs, where the two participants aren’t clearly AGENT and PATIENT, but both have both roles. So, kissing and getting kissed can be the same event, for each participant, while punching and getting punched are separate events, even if both are occurring simultaneously (”They punched each other”.) Admittedly, this is sort of a squishy, ad hoc analysis, motivated mainly by the transitivity distinctions that you noted—that’s semantics for ya!

The other examples you mention are sometimes termed “Middle Voice” constructions. They’re passive-like, in that the contained verbs have a transitive version with an object NP, and also an intransitive version where that NP (and its theta-role) appear in subject position. What keeps them from being passives is the lack of special verbal morphology (in English). Apparently ancient Greek (and Latin?) had “middle-voice” verbal marking, alongside of “passive-voice” marking, so the term “middle voice” is kind of a holdover from classical-languages scholarship. In English, where the verb inflections look just like active-voice, it’s unclear whether you want to talk about a syntactic operation in these cases (object moves to subject position), or just a lexically-coded thematic alternation (PATIENT codes as transitive object or intransitive subject).

I kind of want to assimilate cases like this to the “unaccusative” verbs, of which there are tons in English and other modern languages. Unaccusative verbs are intransitive, but (as I like to call them), “closet transitives”. Their single, subject-position argument starts out as a (D-Structure) object, and typically takes a theta role
characteristic of object position–e.g., PATIENT. They will often show a transitive/intransitive alternation, with the same role-behavior described above: PATIENT in object position, or in (intransitive) subject position—for example: Fred broke the window; The window broke. There are some (to me) pretty convincing arguments that these verbs do involve syntactic movement, just like passives do. I’ll attach the portion of my Syntax packet that deals with unaccusatives. It will give you many examples of unaccusative verbs (and their counterparts, “unergatives”–the true intransitives), and also outline some of the arguments for syntactic movement. The file is in Word Perfect, but Word ought to open it for you. You should also take a look at Beth Levin’s book called, I think, /Unaccusatives./

Here’s another transitive/intransitive puzzle to chew on, that I’ve been thinking about for some years (sometimes I think I pretty well understand what’s going on here–other times, not). The verb /grow/ is
either transitive or intransitive, in sentences like “We grew tomatoes” “The tomatoes are growing (well)”. In those sentences, intransitive /grow /looks like a normal unaccusative. However, the verb doesn’t always work this way. About 10 years ago, people started talking about “growing the company/ department/ program/ revenue stream”, etc., which sounded ungrammatical to me at first hearing, and seems clearly to have been a grammatical neologism, but has caught on pretty thoroughly. So … what’s the difference between “growing tomatoes”, which was always normal, and “growing the company”, which once was n/g, but has become normal? And what’s the difference between both of those, and the following usage, which is still (I think) n/g for everyone: “We grew the baby, by feeding it a healthy diet” ??? In some cases, /grow/ accepts, and in other cases resists, unaccusative grammar. And which cases work which way is subject to change over time. So what’s the crucial feature here, that distinguishes the different cases?

Happy Linguistics!

T. Dieterich

11 days left! The One Laptop Per Child project is opening sales to the public (U.S. and Canada only, alas) for a very short time. For $400, you get one laptop, a year of T-Mobile Hotspot, a $200 tax deduction, AND another laptop is sent to an “educationally underserved child in a poor country.” It’s a pretty good deal, I think.

This really is a groundbreaking machine in many ways, and I hope that it will pave the way for low-cost, energy-efficient, feature-full consumer models. Check out the review here, and be sure to watch the video: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/technology/circuits/04pogue.html

P.S. Santa says that I’m getting one of these. I can hardly wait! He hated to ruin the surprise, but was afraid I’d get impatient and buy one myself because of the short purchasing window.