On Saturday we went for a hike:

With our dog:

In the mountains:

On the way home, we stopped at the World's Tallest Snowwoman, in Bethel, Maine:

Where I made a call on my phone:

And found out that from September to December Misty and I are going to live here:

I'm the recipient of the Ralph A. Johnston Writing Fellowship, given by the University of Texas at Austin and the Texas Institute of Letters.

I need an emoticon that means, I bow respectfully to you. Blogger friend says his mother's just died. I don't want to send words. Oh, words. Words, you words. I need gestures, postures.

The pressing question is, what did people sing on birthdays before the Happy Birthday song was written? The answer: nothing.

According to scholar Elizabeth Pleck, birthday parties did not become common even among wealthy Americans until the late 1830s; modern birthday cakes emerged after 1850; and peer-culture birthday parties, involving children of the same age as the child whose birthday was being celebrated, emerged between 1870 and 1920, after American urban public schools became age-graded. Thus, the prerequisites for the development of a standard birthday song – the proliferation of birthday celebrations that involved a dramatic moment at which a group of invitees, often children, addressed the honoree -- may not have been in place until shortly before “Happy Birthday to You” started to become popular.

From an interesting article about the copyright history of the Happy Birthday song.

Misty, meaning to say "rural or urban," instead saying "url and -- " and stopping short of "url and burban."

My essay on "so" for April's Seed just came online. But do see the print version if you can: the graphics, a spill of 70's style loop-de-loops in black and white, is gorgeous.

“If I was a fish and there was bisphenol-a in the water, I’d be concerned,” he said. “If I was a fetus and my mother was using a plastic water bottle, I wouldn’t be bothered.”

Don't panic.

I am obliged to quote from today's NYT report from the Harry Potter lexicon trial:

It was an emotional culmination to three hours of testimony in which Mr. Vander Ark gushed over Ms. Rowling and her work like the devoted fan that he claimed to be, and disarmingly preceded almost every answer to a question with an “Um.”

Thanks for plugging my book, Steven! The check's in the mail.

Yes, yes, yes: Um... has the answers (and more!), if you're asking questions about these topics:

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i keep mixing up my words is this early alzheimer's spoonerisms
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disfluency disorders
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dubya's linguistic blunders
eliminating the word "um" in speech exercises

(culled from the search terms by which people have arrived at umthebook.com.

Geoff Nunberg talked about "um" -- and mentioned my book, Um... -- on Fresh Air yesterday; the text of his piece is here.

He invents a term that I particular like: the "umological paradox," which is that why is a word that's communicatively so useful routinely so criticized and battered? I think I provided the answer in the book: a changing technological and media landscape in the early 20th century, as well as new ideals about the presentation of self, more widespread opportunities to speak in public, and the commercializing of broadcast media changed how we judged others' speaking and regulated our own. It's true that some mention against "urs" (as by Oliver Wendell Holmes) appears earlier, but the prescription against "um" just wasn't as widespread then as it is now. Now everybody thinks that umlessness is godliness -- or, at least, the mark of eloquence (or a piece of it).

I know this shift occurred because for the book I looked through as many 18th and 19th books as I thought would contain such finger-shaking. They didn't. That's not to say that people were more lax then. They had plenty of rules about how language should be used, but it was mainly about dialect and pronunciation, not about making uninterrupted utterances.

Somebody once asked me, "How will Um... make me play poker?" Here's one answer: if "um" can be used deliberately (as Geoff points out) as well as unintentionally, then the simple presence of "um" (or some other pause filler) isn't as telling as you might like. Here a tell isn't always a tell.

Also, unfortunately, the Globe & Mail designers had no way (or so they claimed) of representing the IPA symbol for "schwa," so it ran with my note, "schwa," in what should be a phonemic transcription of a Ket and ancestral Athabaskan word.

Embarrassing.