I like ‘Star Trek.’ I love my child more.

This isn’t abuse, exactly, but it’s probably not good parenting:

With the birth of his son 15 years ago, dedicated linguist d’Armond Speers embarked on the ultimate experiment: He spoke to him only in Klingon — the language of the alien race of “Star Trek” fame — for the first three years of his life.

“I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language,” Speers said. “He was definitely starting to learn it.”

I’ve been a dad all of, oh, nearly 15 months now. I’m still a novice, it feels like, and still exhausted because the precious lil’ woogums has started waking up in the middle of the night, every night, all over again. So sometimes my parenting judgment is clouded.

But I think I can safely make this call:

Parents, your child is not a science experiment.

Parents, your child is not a freak flag to be flown at the fanboy conventions.*

Parents, your job is to raise your child to deal with the world as best as he/she can with the resources he/she has. If you start their lives by equipping them only with tools useful in a fantasy world, you are not doing your job.

*Twitterfriend Jason Snell points out Speers is a linguist, not a fanboy. Duly noted.
That is all.

The great “meh” debate: Is peace at hand between PW and City Paper?

More “meh” news! After I took City Paper’s Molly Eichel to task for her disparagement of Collins English Dictionary for including the word “meh” in its next edition, Eichel did the sensible thing: She called in a referee — Ben Zimmer at Visual Thesaurus.

Just for background, remember that Molly wrote the following:

Meh isn’t a word. It’s a sound effect. There are other onomatopoetic words in the dictionary like bam, pop or bang but those have more real world applications than [meh] used when commenting on the Internet.

And I responded:

Meh isn’t onomatopoetic, first of all. Unless Eichel knows what apathy actually sounds like.

But when you use the word meh, you’re actually communicating. It’s a very short way of saying something like “I don’t think I agree with the statement you just made, but I don’t care enough about it (or maybe I just don’t care enough about your opinion) to make a sustained or impassioned counterargument.”

Zimmer, with the wisdom of Solomon, splits the baby in two:

Let me try to step in here. I’d say that meh is indeed onomatopoetic, insofar as it represents the sound of a short emphatic exclamation. Onomatopoeia doesn’t just include conventional representations of the natural sounds that things make, like bam or pop, but the natural sounds that people make too. So score one point for Eichel.

Uh-oh.

But score one point for Mathis on the whole “It’s not a word! It is too a word!” back-and-forth. As we saw recently in the case of funner and funnest, people often throw the “not a real word” criticism at items in the lexicon that bother them for some reason. And as lexicographical sweetheart Erin McKean has argued, if it looks wordish, sounds wordish, and acts wordish, then guess what? It’s a word.

Woo hoo!

Zimmer then proceeds to delve into the history of “meh” — including a look at its (unsurprising) Yiddish roots. Fascinating stuff, if you’re a word geek.

In the meantime, Molly Eichel isn’t the only person I’ve stepped into the “meh” fray with. My colleague Ben Boychuk takes me on in our Scripps Howard column this week. He writes:

A devolved language undermines our public discourse. “Meh” isn’t the end of the world, of course. But it is another tiny capitulation in the dumbing down of the United States of Whatever.

Ben sure has a way with words — at least the ones that existed before 1940.

In any case, I hope Ben Zimmer’s judgment can bring peace between Eichel and myself. And if not, well, you know: Meh.

UPDATE: Molly posts her two cents here. And she offers up a devastating reply to my “apathy” comment:

Sweetheart, I used to be a suburban teenager. I, in fact, know exactly what apathy sounds like.

I have no good comeback in me. You win that round, Eichel.

Not politics: “Meh” is not only a word, it’s a great word!

At the risk of aggravating our frienemies over at City Paper, I have to take issue with Molly Eichel’s rant about the inclusion of the word “meh” in the new Collins English Dictionary.

Eichel writes:

But here’s the deal: Meh isn’t a word. It’s a sound effect. There are other onomatopoetic words in the dictionary like bam, pop or bang but those have more real world applications then the expression of fuck-if-I-care used when commenting on the Internet.

Collins English Dictionary, thanks for ruining the English language for the sake of an AP article.

She’s wrong, of course.

“Meh” isn’t onomatopoetic, first of all. Unless Eichel knows what apathy actually sounds like.

But when you use the word “meh,” you’re actually communicating. It’s a very short way of saying something like “I don’t think I agree with the statement you just made, but I don’t care enough about it (or maybe I just don’t care enough about your opinion) to make a sustained or impassioned counterargument.”

(Which, come to think of it, would probably be the smarter response to Eichel than the one I’m writing.)

So if somebody comes to you and says “I think Mayor Nutter isn’t going far enough — Philly should close ALL its libraries,” the correct response isn’t, “Pop!” It’s, “I agree.” Or “I disagree.”

Or “meh.” They’ll know exactly what you mean. “Meh” is a great word.”

The silliest thing a conservative has said today: I’m more 9/11 than you

From Charles Krauthammer, who I imagine will be making a regular appearance in this feature, castigating Barack Obama’s lack of experience:

Who do you want answering that phone at 3 a.m.? A man who’s been cramming on these issues for the last year, who’s never had to make an executive decision affecting so much as a city, let alone the world? A foreign-policy novice instinctively inclined to the flabbiest, most vaporous multilateralism (e.g., the Berlin Wall came down because of “a world that stands as one”), and who refers to the most deliberate act of war since Pearl Harbor as “the tragedy of 9/11,” a term more appropriate for a bus accident?

This is the first I’ve heard that using the word “tragedy” is a sign of some kind of squishy soft-on-terror appeasement. Unfortunately, Krauthammer doesn’t really enlighten us as to the proper SUPERLATIVE term to describe 9/11 — although he did, a few years ago, say that we shouldn’t refer to 9/11 as a tragedy but as an “act of war.” Why can’t it be both? Unless, of course, you’re posturing in order to make your political opponents look like soft-on-terror squishes.

If “tragedy” doesn’t cover it, I’m afraid we’re going to have to start adapting English in the German method, by combining lots of words together to convey the sheer awfulness of 9/11. Something like “Osamaandtheterriblehorriblenogoodverybaddaytragicactofwar.” I’m just spit-balling here.

Of course, in the face of a tragedy — yeah, I said it — like 9/11 the humble thing might be to recognize the limits of language in expressing our horror, and to cut other folks some slack in their descriptions. But there’s no political advantage to be gained from that.