SANTA CLARA – Delanie Walker spoke at his locker Friday afternoon. Here’s what he said about Jim Harbaugh.
Q: Harbaugh is intense on the sidelines. What do you guys think about that?
WALKER: He’s not yelling at us. He’s yelling at the referees. We’re excited when we see that. We see our coach is fighting for us.
Q: He’s got a lot of slogans. Do those work on pros?
WALKER: The funny ones.
Q: Any you can share?
WALKER: We’ve bought into the philosophy of Jim Harbaugh. We don’t give nothing away.
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Hope Jims’ philosophy endures for years to come with this team.
I love it!!! what a difference from the Coach Singletary era!
Chi
U mean u wern’t satisfied with the “we will check the film and get back to you” response to every single question?
Agreed! Remember at the end when poor Singletary would just stand there on the sideline and offer….well, nothing! He had become a spectator. No Xs and Os, no scheme, no input on the offensive and defensive playcalls (presumably). Just a huge contrast to what we have now in Jim. This SB is so F’ing huge for us….we could be in the beginning stages, with Kap, of a nice 8-10 year run. All the pieces are there. Even if they don’t win Sunday, but all the great franchises of the last 40 years needed that one play
( The Catch, the Imaculate reception, the Tuck play, etc.). I’m jazzed!
@Manteca who? LOL..
Who? LOL.
Who? LOL..
What the matter Willie Winer….can’t read, spell or operate a keyboard??
does that philosophy include the use of double negatives?
listening to pro athletes speak is getting down right embarrassing.
ya know with all these schools that have football players move on to the NFL and are quoted or go in front of a camera, you’d think at the very minimum these “institutions of higher learning” would want these guys to be able to speak if not eloquently then with clear and proper English.
They have no time for English they have to cram extra hard to do good in their Golf or Music Appreciation classes
dang, i’m sounding grumpier and grumpier as i get older. i sound like my grandmother when she used to correct my speech and writing (she was a tech manual editor one of the big aero-space companies for 30 something years).
i’m still astounded at how many people don’t know the difference between an adverb and an adjective.
btw. i took golf and jazz history in college.
All4
I feel ur pain brotha. Every time i turn the radio on these days I have to bite my tongue to keep from lapsing in to a “in my day music was sooooo much better” diatribe. I mean C’mon Bieber and Nicky Minaj are headliners? They would not have been let in the building in the 60s and 70s even the 90s had Nirvana and gangster rap.
No shame in taking golf as a class Pop Culture media was one of my fav classes
Consider some of the societal standards for context of the athletes:
“W” Bush
Michelle Bachman
Snooki
I watched a high school teacher talking about keeping up standards in linguistics and literature, and she talked and sounded like a Valley Girl.
Whoo-ey Guys! That one spun off, LOL. But JPN, doesn’t that validate my “W”/Bachman/Snooki claim?
Isn’t culture and language like water? Finds its own level.
OK, I need to stop now, my brain is out of condition and all this academic thinking will make it sore. Back to ‘Pound the rock!’
Face it all4fun
The English language belongs to us all, not just a select few white folk, and everything evolves. Pop culture isn’t going anywhere, and as a result, the norms of speech are shifting.
Language has been evolving into a simpler and more efficient form since the Indo-European days. In fact the Indo-European language was even more complicated than Latin which had bazillion conjugations. Latin based languages have lost many of those conjugations and these ongoing changes continue today. More recently Latin American Spanish speaking people have dropped the 2nd person informal conjugation (vosotros) which is still used in Spain. English lost its informal tenses which were used with “thou” and “ye”. “You” was actually originally a formal 2nd person pronoun. I’m no linguist, but this is my basic understanding of examples of language evolution.
But there is a tradeoff; you gain efficiency but lose the ability to be specific and descriptive. For example: Years ago, my Grandmother complained that too many people used the word “quality” as an adjective as if it had a positive descriptive meaning. Such as “this is a quality new car”. What she wanted to hear was “this is a GOOD quality new car”. “Good” being the adjective describing car’s inherent state of being. But years later the use and definition of “quality” changed to be also used as an adjective denoting a positive characteristic. But now it is less common to hear something described as something of poor quality.
Anyway, no matter how you view the evolution of language, there is nothing more efficient about using double negatives. It has nothing to do with race culture…“a select few white folk” …and more to do with socio-economic class as there are plenty of folks from all different races that speak eloquently in English.
All4Fun
We don’t give anything away – 8 syllables
We don’t give nothing away – 7 syllables
Efficiency by measure of math.
The above post by allforfunnplay ranks as one of the most misinformed statements I have ever read on this blog, and that is no small feat. I will try to put this briefly as I can, but please understand that a post explaining how erroneous the above conclusions are would be pages in length. So, let’s concentrate on the two most grievous claims.
Let’s take the thesis statement first: “Language has been evolving into a simpler and more efficient form since the Indo-European days.” This single statement evinces a serious misapprehension of linguistic evolution as well as the erroneous presumption that synthetic languages (those that use affixes to code grammatical information) are more complex and less efficient than analytic languages (those, such as ModE (Modern English), that use word order to code grammatical information).
With respect to linguistic evolution, while it is true that one of the mechanisms of linguistic evolution is efficiency, it is not the only mechanism. Cultural and economic forces are involved as well. Additionally, not only is efficiency relative to the context of the language and its speakers, but as changes occur (i.e. as the language evolves), some aspects of a language may become less efficient even as others become more efficient. The ‘Functionalist’ school of linguistics goes so far as to claim that linguistic evolution is cyclical between analytic and synthetic.
Next, even if we were to just focus on efficiency, it is vastly oversimplifying the issue to only look at word form complexity (the correct term is morphological complexity, but I do not have time or space to explain what morphology and morphemes are beyond that morphemes are the smallest meaningful units of a language and morphology is the system of how morphemes are combined in a language) and conclude that synthetic languages are less efficient than analytic languages merely because the words are more complex in synthetic languages. Consider the following: the English phrase “The Roman Senate and People” is comprised of five words. The Latin form, “Senatus Populusque Romanus” is three words. So, isn’t the Latin more efficient (fewer words)? But wait, the Latin phrase is seven morphemes whereas the English phrase is only five morphemes, so isn’t the English more efficient?
The Latin is more economical in its use of words whereas the English is more economical in its use of morphemes. Both are complex, but the complexity, and the efficiency, manifest differently.
This leads me to Proto-Indo-European issue. First, it is important to note that Proto-Indo-European is not a “real” language. It is a reconstruction of a language from its descendant languages. The real parent language (or languages) to the modern Indo-European family might have more or less morphological complexity than Latin (or Greek, Sanskrit, etc.) but as direct evidence of the language or languages actually spoken does not exist, we cannot state with certainty how complex the morphology was, and thus cannot draw the conclusion that the reduction of morphological complexity in Indo-European languages has been a linear trend.
Also, if we are going to discuss proto-languages, or even attested ancestral languages, it is illustrative to consider that the historical Indo-European model of reduction of morphological complexity is not universal to all language families. A variety of South American languages, such as the Carib language family, show the opposite trend of moving from less complex morphology to more complex morphology, as do certain branches of the Sino-Tibetan language family. How do we account for this? For a variety of reasons, increased morphological complexity is more efficient for speakers of those languages at the present time. As I stated above, one school of thought in linguistics is that these changes are cyclical, and that language evolution moves back and forth between synthetic (morphological complexity) and analytic (word order complexity) linguistic structures.
Moving beyond the theoretical issues, let’s look at the double negative problem. A little history is in order. Old English (Late West Saxon) texts, both prose and poetry, are rife with multiple negative constructions. Each negative served to intensify the proceeding negatives. The use of one was negative; the use of two was more negative; the use of three was even more negative; etc. Moving forward in time, in Middle English, some constructions required two negative particles for the negation to be complete; Middle English also retained the compounding negativity usage of Old English. So, why do we now consider double negatives to be logical positives, and thus improper?
We can thank a man named Robert Lowth, a 16th century bishop and mathematician, and a founder of the prescriptive school of grammar. Lowth prescribed several rules for English, which had not been rules theretofore, based on logical forms and Latin grammar. One was the double negative = logical positive rule. Others included the prohibitions against splitting negative (which is possible, and regular, in English, but impossible in Latin) and ending sentences with prepositions (also regular in English but impossible in Latin). So, from a historical perspective, multiple negatives were a part of English and their proscription, from its inception, was artificial.
In effect, education has created an artificial standard, a learned (rather than naturally acquired) dialect that, via hypercorrection, excises the natural patterns of the language in favor of imposed patterns derived from logical forms and/or the grammatical limitations of “superior” languages. Interestingly, despite centuries of prescriptive grammar being imposed on school children, many dialects of English preserve the natural patterns of the language even in the face of the attempts to eradicate them.
Tying this back in to the efficiency of a double negative red herring raised above (the second grievous claim), the error is in the presumption that the “correct” single negative and the “incorrect” double negative have the same meaning and therefore the double negative is less efficient. A double negative has a different meaning than a single negative – the negative is intensified beyond the use of a single negative. Under the artificial prescriptive rules of grammar, the only way to intensify a negative is to add an adverbial intensifier to the sentence or choose more nuanced, but less common, terminology. However, the use of multiple negatives to intensify the negativity is as efficient, if not more so, than the use of more complex constructions (adverbial intensifiers) and/or the use of less commonly used words to intensify negativity, both of which might cause misunderstanding among some interlocutors. And that is the true measure of the efficiency, and eloquence, of the use of language – that those listening or reading understand the ideas conveyed with as much ease, and as little chance of misunderstanding, as possible.
The irony of my entire post is that, given my comment immediately above, this post is likely neither efficient nor eloquent with respect to my audience, even though it follows the standard prescriptive rules of formal English writing.
JPN
Whoa there, horsey!!!
That was a mouthful!
“That’s what she said!”
You don’t got NOTHIN on me, tho.
Contractions dammit, it started with contractions!
Thank you for an interesting discussion.
First let me say that you’re right about my mentioning of “PROTO-Indo-European” language (in fact I’m not sure I correctly identified it as PROTO) which is as you say a theoretical backwards reconstruction. But let’s stick with the Indo-European languages. My examples of “simplification”; I guess can be more accurately called “LOSS OF DECLENSION” (or is it declination?) over time. My simple question to you is which is easier to learn and conjugate: modern Italian or Latin? Old English or Modern English? (By book and classroom because it is obviously easier to learn a spoken language.) Now from what I’ve read and discussed with linguists are that these “simplifications” occur as groups of people speaking one language begin encountering others that speak another language. People simplify to become more efficient at communicating with a language that is not their own. This eventually influences the language itself to change. It is interesting that the languages you mention that have become more complex are also from regions with people that until relatively recently were more or less secluded from all the other speakers of other languages. Meaning less interaction with other languages meant less changes and simplification of their own languages. On this last part, I am just making a mostly uneducated guess.
Now as to the use of double negatives. Yes, historically they have been used; particularly in literature as you say to emphasize the negative in a statement. And yes, I’m aware that the “rule” was made sometime in the 16th or 17th century (I couldn’t remember the details). Language is a fluid thing that changes for many reasons and not always for the better. So someone drew up some rules. The double negative rule was made because DOUBLE NEGATIVES DO NOT LOGICALLY MAKE SENSE. As for efficiency, let me provide a simple example.
If I say “YOU DO NOT HAVE NOTHING!”
What do I mean? Do I mean you have nothing? Do I mean you have everything? Do I mean you have something? It’s obviously all about context.
What if I said “YOU DON’T GOT NOTHING!” Just with the poor sentence structure you can GUESS that I mean that you actually have nothing.
If we get rid of double negatives there is less of a need to interpret meaning based on context. “YOU HAVE NOTHING” “YOU DO NOT HAVE ANYTHING”
You can understand what I mean by the simple logical construct of my sentence. Or in other words more efficient.
Let’s bring this back to FOOTBALL.
I’ve enjoyed reading recent articles about how Tom Brady and the Patriots have adopted a one word hurry up offensive system that they’ve adapted from Chip Kelly’s Oregon Offense. They have streamlined the name of plays into one word which tells receivers their routes, lineman how to block and runners where to run or block. I find if fascinating that Bill Walsh presciently said that he believed eventually huddles would go away and very simple names for plays would eventually be used. NFL offenses have become increasingly complex over the past 30 years. “Brown Right F Short 2 Jet Flanker Drive X Comeback” is an example of a simple play in West Coast nomenclature. Coryell’s digit system to describe routes for the receivers by comparison seems much simpler. Now I believe that the advent of radios in the helmets of QBs that allow the sideline to call plays directly to a QB has helped to continue to allow offenses to become more complicated with play names becoming more and more complicated because they were no longer restricted by hand signals from the sideline to the QB or a player running in and out of the huddle relaying the play. But I think offenses have reached a tipping point where they are beginning to look for more flexibility as more QBs make more pre-snap reads and adjustments. So a more efficient play calling system is beginning to evolve. As JPN001 stated that some schools of thought believe that language goes through cycles of complexity and simplification. And as it is so with football play calling because back in the days of Johnny Unitas, play calling system was much simpler because QB’s called the plays on the field.
NOTE: I wrote this in the middle of the night (1 year old woke up) so it may be completely incoherent rambling.
All4Fun
Not at all! It’s a great read. Your revue of the histories of language and playcalling are fascinating.
I really will keep this one short(er).
I will skip over the larger complexity/efficiency issues as my original comments still stand. I do want to further address the double negative = logical positive issue.
Double negatives may not be logical in the context of external logical forms (i.e. mathematical forms), but may be logical in the context of the syntax of the language. The error is in assuming that linguistic forms conform to external mathematical logic rather than to internal syntactic logic. Mathematically, a negative + a negative = a positive. Linguistically, a negative plus a negative may equate to intensification of the negative, if that system is allowed in the language. In other languages, the second negative may be ungrammatical and serve to negate the first (that is, make it positive) rather than to enhance the first. In still other languages, the use of a second negative may be just ungrammatical without resulting in a logical contradiction. But, whatever the internal logic of the syntax of a language with respect to negation, that syntactic logic will be an organic growth of a living language, not an imposition of external logical forms.
Within the natural syntactic logic of English, even ModE, multiplication of negatives does not follow the mathematical model. So, when speakers of English hear or read “You don’t got nothing,” they do not process it as a positive and then have to reprocess it to understand it was a negative. They process it as a negative, just as they do “You don’t have anything,” or “You have nothing.” Further, it is important to note that the meanings of these constructions are different. In the first construction, the negative is intensified; it is more emphatic than in the second two. (The second two differ in meaning from each other as well, but that is beyond our scope here.)
If it we did reprocess multiple negatives in the mathematical model, that would be less efficient, and such an inefficiency would likely be selected against; however, we do not process them so. We process them as negative constructions, just as Old English speakers did and Middle English speakers did, not as positive constructions that were meant negatively. Since no additional processing is required to understand double negatives, the supposed inefficiency is illusory.
And if ya’ll don’t believe me, get me access to one of them there fancy fMRI machines and I’ll show ya’ll that you don’t know nothin’ no how.
On a side note, Ms Tuna considers an MRI as equivalent to water-boarding; strapped own, inserted into an oversized trash can and subjected against one’s will and better judgement to Heavy Metal Music. She had to have two, back-to-back, and due to an ear problem couldn’t have an earplug in one ear (tho she did have the ear muffs).
All4 and JPN
Thanks for the interesting read. I learned alot (of what i could understand at least). Its nice that we can have all sorts of discussions (football, linguistics, OJ case) in one forum. Its great I feel smarter for just having read the above exchanges. And nobody made any homophibic coments or insulted other posters during the whole thread.
Having said that, I believe above is the proof that 2 weeks is TOO DAMN LONG to wait for the SB we stil have 7 days to go and we as a fanbase have, to use JH phrase, “plowed every parcel of land there is to plow and re-plowed it” I just want the game to be played already.
“I believe above is the proof that 2 weeks is TOO DAMN LONG to wait for the SB…”
BOS9er, not only did this make me laugh, I have to agree with it 100%.
Mister Everything [that's five syllables] sez:
everything evolves… and the norms of speech are shifting.
could we see some writing samples from his kids to determine
whether they succumbed to pop culture jargon
and now for a Definition of Double Negative, Coach Harbaw sez:
1. NO chew [at least until after losing to Baltimore next week...]
2. NO diet cokes (4-5 per day….what??!!!)