In a new WPI podcast, Erica Brozovsky, assistant teaching professor in the Department of Humanities & Arts, helps listeners explore the history of words and the unique factors that determine how people speak the way they do. Brozovsky is a sociolinguist who teaches writing and rhetoric. Listen to hear the conversation. You may also read a transcript below.
Jon Cain:
Words. They’re written, spoken, heard, and read. But how often do you think about them? Here’s your chance to take some time to do just that. Today, you’ll learn about the history of some of them. And we’ll explore why you might pronounce your words differently than someone else. Think accents.
Hi. I’m Jon Cain from the marketing communications division at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. That’s WPI. This podcast brings you news and expertise from our classrooms and labs. Today’s episode we’re calling “Across Words.”
I’m excited to be here at the WPI Global Lab in the Innovation Studio. And I’m thrilled to be here with someone who’s going to launch us on a language journey today.
Erica Brozovsky is an assistant professor in the Department of Humanities and Arts at WPI. She’s a sociolinguist, a lover of words, and the host of Otherwords. It’s a fun and informative PBS web series that explores language, linguistics, and what it means to be human.
Hi Erica.
Erica, A lot of us fly through our lives not thinking about words and how we say them and what that says about us - why did you decide to research and teach about these topics?
Erica Brozovsky:
I’ve always been a big fan of words and language in general—I was a voracious reader as a child, and still enjoy reading in my limited free time. I applied to college as a linguistics major and ended up sticking with it. It gave me a way to explain and understand the differences in the way people talk, and when the opportunity came to go to grad school, I jumped on it. I have always loved learning—it’s my favorite activity—and the chance to spend another six years just focused on learning stuff? Priceless. And in my experience, the best way to learn something thoroughly is through teaching it. Students will ask questions that make you, as the instructor, really think critically and that will challenge your views or interpretations, and it’s such a fun and intellectually engaging way to get deeper. I’m also really excited about language and linguistics and want to share that with everyone.
Cain:
You’re the perfect person to help us with this, today, then. I figured since WPI’s a STEM school, I thought you could tell us about the backstory on some common tech terms. For instance – let’s talk about some internet terms today. Chances are somebody’s asked you what web browser you like to use. Where did that term ‘browser’ come from?
Brozovsky:
I might not answer which web browser I prefer. So people can have their own answers to that. It's a hot topic. A lot of hot takes on that. But the word browser in the computational internet context goes back to the 1960s which seems pretty early, given that the first actual web browser wasn't written until 1990. The internet was around at that time, just not accessible to the general public. But the term itself originated as an acronym, so all caps BROWSER. It stands for BRowsing On-Line With SElective Retrieval
Cain:
An acronym, I should have known. What about surfing the web, how did surfing become the activity of choice to best describe what we do using our favorite browser?
Brozovsky:
That one dates back to the early 90s. It’s usually attributed to a librarian: Jean Armour Polly. She wrote an article in 1992 for fellow librarians, kind of explaining the internet and how to use it, and she wanted a pithy metaphor for the fun and the chaos of navigating the online world. As it turns out, actually, her mousepad happened to have a surfer with the words “information surfer” on it. It sparked an idea, and “Surfing the Internet” was born. Around the same time, a comic book called “The Adventures of Captain Internet and CERF Boy” came out, CERF is an acronym for the California Education and Research Federation. So, C,E, R, F. In it, Captain Internet and her sidekick CERF Boy surf around, on an actual surfboard, answering internet cries for help.
Cain:
Heroes to the rescue. Surfing gives that fun vibe. But there’s a flip side that can knock you right off your board. You’ve probably heard of phishing scams, right? Erica, how did these deceptive online attacks come to be known by that word?
Brozovsky:
Yes, let’s keep it oceanic: Phishing with a PH is allegedly based on the homophone fishing (with an f). So, think, trawling for sensitive information from a sea of internet users. It’s attributed to hacker Khan C. Smith sometime in the mid 1990s. The alternative spelling is a nod to phreaking, which was a way of hacking telephones, hence the “ph,” to avoid paying long-distance phone charges.
Cain:
Are there any other internet terms that have sort of fun back stories to them that you can share with us?
Brozovsky:
Oh yeah, we're all familiar with spam, too. It's one of those annoying, ubiquitous things part of internet life, right? So spam, the word comes from an iconic Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch where a horde of Vikings enter a cafe and they repeat the menu item, Spam, capital S, Spam, right? Repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly, over and over, drowning out any other sound in the cafe. So just spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, much like spam pops up in our inboxes.
Cain:
Sure does. Some interesting backstory there on those words. What about when we put all those words together and verbalize them? We may each say them a little differently. I’ve always heard of people having a dialect, but you say there’s also something called an idiolect – what is that?
Brozovsky:
An idiolect is essentially all the properties that make up how an individual specific person talks. It’s each of our unique ways of speaking and how we each use language and patterns, words, pronunciations, even references, in a way that’s different from anyone else.
Cain:
How do we develop our own idiolect?
Brozovsky:
That’s just by being a person, right. So, much like how every person is unique, our fingerprints are different, our dental records are different, so are our ways that we speak. Your idiolect is built and molded by countless factors: the language or languages you speak, the society you were born into, the schools you went to, the TV you watched, the friends you made, the inside jokes you created, the places you visited, countless things. We communicate to express ourselves, so your lived experiences will inform what you say and how you say it, shaping your idiolect.
Cain:
Makes a lot of sense. So, we hear a lot about new words introduced each year into the Merriam Webster dictionary. I’m assuming the way our collective society talks is changing as well. Why is it that regional dialects change over time – is it a generational thing?
Brozovsky:
Language is always changing. I love language variation and change. It’s my pet interest. So, it’s constantly changing. But yes, regional dialect change over time tends to be generational. In the American South, for example, there’s the Southern Vowel Shift: think older folks saying prahs [price] and younger folks saying price, and there’s drey-is and dress. A lot of the change is based on migration patterns, where people from different areas came together. When two or more dialects meet, there’s a phenomenon known as dialect leveling, where the variation between the two decreases over time, and over generations will standardize into something that’s kind of in the middle of the two. However, it doesn’t mean we’re losing all those fun, unique regionalisms—new features might get adopted, and older ones, like the y’all, for example, might get shared.
Cain:
Ever changing and traveling across the country and the world. Is there any way to visualize these differences in how we speak?
Brozovsky:
Absolutely. I think this is so cool. So our mouths can be mapped and we can show where all the sounds come from and where they’re articulated in the mouth.
So, consonant sounds are caused by closing parts of your mouth. A B sound comes from your lips closing together, like a buh. Or for the T sound, tuh, is the tongue and the space just behind the teeth, called the alveolar ridge causing a closure. Vowels are produced with open shapes. Ah, oh, ee. The placement of vowel sounds are a lot less exact, which makes them easier to change. So, we can think of the mouth as a trapezoid, and all the vowels fall somewhere in that trapezoid. Sounds like eee and ih are at the top front of the mouth. Ahh and aww are further down and back in the mouth. If you make the sounds yourself, you might be able to feel the space where they’re actually happening in your mouth. Or at least you can tell that eee and aww are happening at different places in your mouth.
Of course, everyone’s idiolects are different, but there’s generally a range of where vowels fall in a particular regional accent, and those ranges can change. The sounds you might think of as the southern drawl, for example, are a collection of changes to where and how southerners produce vowel sounds inside of their mouths. The a [eɪ] sound in “face” that I make toward the front of my mouth drops down and moves farther back to sound more like fuh-eece in Georgia. In the Midwest, instead of how I pronounce bag, they might say bayg, which is higher in the mouth and more towards the front.
Cain:
You've done some of this mapping for your dissertation and research, right?
Brozovsky:
Absolutely, yeah. I researched Taiwanese Americans in Texas, and I looked at them in terms of linguistic identity, both what they were saying about their identity and also how they were speaking, both literally in the mouth and also conceptually the words that they were saying. So I wanted to compare these Taiwanese Americans in Texas, Taiwanese Texans, I called them. I wanted to compare them to other people in Texas, and to see if they had that, you know, stereotypical Texas accent. I interviewed 50 people. I hand transcribed 50 people's interviews, their hour and a half long sociolinguistic interviews, and I was able to map using linguistic software where each of those vowels fell in their mouths, and each person's vowel placement is totally unique. There are similarities, of course, because they're from similar areas, but it's fun to see how they fall in the mouth and how different they are based on their identity themselves.
Cain:
What did you find in terms of comparing to that traditional Texas accent?
Brozovsky:
I did find that most of them did not have that strong Texas twang or drawl that people think of because that accent is not as apparent generally in a lot of the bigger cities where the Taiwanese populations were. That’s more, you’re going to get in East Texas and West Texas, but not so much in Dallas, or Austin, or Houston where a lot of people live in general.
Cain:
How do you incorporate some of these sociolinguistic concepts, and your research experience into the writing and rhetoric courses you teach here at WPI?
Brozovsky:
I think it’s impossible for any instructor not to include their pet interests and research areas in their teaching. When I come up with off-the-cuff examples, they’ll be based on what I know and what I am interested in. Also, a lot of effective research lies in observing, so I like to let my students do a lot of the talking and we as a class get to analyze what comes next.
Specifically in my courses at WPI, I’m focused on letting the students’ voices come through in their writing, which is a very descriptivist choice (as opposed to prescriptivism where there’s one right way to do something). So, while yes, I need to make sure they know the so-called rules or standards per se when it comes to formal academic writing, I encourage them to speak from their own experience and worldview, because, as we’ve established, it’s unique. I don’t want to read the same essay written the same way twenty times. I want twenty unique essays that only each of those specific students could have written.
Also once you learn the rules, I mean, you get to break them. That’s paraphrasing Picasso. He said something like: Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.
Cain:
Words to live by. What do you hope students take away from your classes?
Brozovsky:
Well, we can never have too many writers. But really, I want them to feel empowered and confident in their ability to communicate effectively with a variety of audiences.
I also want them to come away with an appreciation for the humanities. Yes, WPI is a STEM school, but the humanities are also incredibly important. If you look at the word humanities, you’ll see that the first part is the word human. Studying and engaging with the humanities is an exercise in both experiencing and understanding what it means to be human, and I want them to realize what a beautiful and critical thing that is.
Cain:
Erica Brozovsky is a sociolinguist and assistant professor in the Department of Humanities and Arts at WPI. Thanks so much for sharing your work with us.
You can learn more about Erica’s work on WPI’s expert database. It’s at wpi.edu/experts.
Erica hosts the PBS web series Otherwords. It’s now in season four of explaining all things linguistic. New episodes come out monthly. You can find a link to episodes at wpi.edu/listen.
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