Australian English, a guest post by Dillon Garrison

Posted on April 4, 2018 by Ed Battistella
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Dillon just completed his bachelor’s degree in Political Science with a minor in English at Southern Oregon University. He works as a freelance copywriter and editor.

Australian English has been perceived in a variety of ways over its relatively short history. With its distinctive accent and penal colony beginnings, Australian English has often been looked down upon in popular mythologies, being seen as “slovenly,” “poorly articulated,” and “nasal.” Yet beginning in the 1980s, the popularity of the Crocodile Dundee movies and television personality Steve Irwin led many to associate Australians and their unique dialect of “Strine” with friendliness, a more relaxed lifestyle, and exotic natural environments. Throughout its evolution separating from British English dialects, Australian English has developed largely through its speakers’ rebellion against British class consciousness and their interaction with the Australian landmass and its original Aboriginal occupants.

Australian English first emerged from the establishment of the British penal colony of New South Wales in 1788. The colonists and convicts who formed the colony came from all over the British Isles, and had to smooth out their regional dialect differences in order to communicate with each other in a process known as “leveling down.” The children of these early colonists were the first speakers of what could be considered the Australian English dialect. By the 1820s a distinct dialect had emerged, and in 1827, Scottish naval surgeon Peter Cunningham released Two Years in New South Wales, documenting the unique accent and vocabulary of the native-born colonists. Cunningham characterized the young colonists as differing from their parents through a heavy London influence. By the 1840s, some English visitors to Australia claimed that Australians were speaking “the purest English on earth:” English with the dialect variations taken out. The discovery of gold in the 1850s brought new waves of (non-convict) migrants to Australia, and new influences upon the language.

Cockney English, the dialect traditionally spoken by working-class Londoners (particularly of the East End), became a big influence on the new Australian dialect, as many of the new arrivals came from London’s slums and prisons. According to Anthony Burgess, ”Australian English may be thought of as a kind of fossilised Cockney of the Dickensian era.” Just why Cockney had such an influence compared to other English dialects is a matter of debate, considering the majority of convicts were from the north of England, as well as Scotland, Ireland, and Wales.

Two more forms grew of Australian grew out of that original dialect. Linguists, beginning with A.G. Mitchell and Arthur Delbridge in 1965, classify three main varieties of Australian speech: Broad, Cultivated, and General Australian (These “varieties” are not distinct but rather are rough markers along a dialect continuum). Starting in the 1880s and well into the 1950s, the elocution movement swept through Australian in response to the newly-developed Received Pronunciation in Britain. Socially-aspirational Australian speakers modified their vowels and diphthongs in order to more closely resemble RP. This form came to be known as Cultivated Australian, and is historically associated with higher social status and levels of education. Some Australian speakers went the opposite way, and in the early twentieth century, a new form now known as Broad Australian emerged, which emphasized the nasality, flatness of intonation, and elision of syllables present in the Australian dialect. While Cultivated Australian expressed a longing and nostalgia for Britain and an upper-class consciousness, Broad Australian expressed Australian nationalism, the working class, and egalitarianism in opposition to the British fixation with class. Meanwhile, the original Australian dialect continued as the most common and became what is now known as General Australian. General Australian is prominent in urban areas and is the standard language for Australian broadcasting.

At the time of colonization, Australia was home to 700-800 Indigenous language varieties across the continent, which can be grouped into over 250 distinct languages (with some estimates as high as 363) and around 28 language families, spoken across a population of around one million people. Many language varieties were spoken by small populations of 40-50 people, with the largest populations speaking a single language numbering around 3-4000 people. The process of colonization proved to be devastating to the traditional Aboriginal languages of Australia; of the 250 distinct languages spoken in 1788, only around 15 are now learned by children as a first language. Another 100 have only small numbers of speakers remaining, and most have no fluent speakers left at all. Australia has experienced the greatest and most rapid loss of languages over the last century of anywhere in the world, with some estimates predicting if current trends continue, there may be no speakers of Indigenous languages at all by 2050.

Most of the vocabulary assimilated into Australian English from Aboriginal languages came from the language spoken in the Port Jackson (now Sydney) area, known variously as the Port Jackson, Sydney, Dharuk, Dharug, or Eora language. The majority of Aboriginal words were used for place names (such as the capital Canberra, which means ‘meeting place’ in Ngunnawal), the unique flora, fauna, and landscape features of the continent, and some slang terms. The first words to come from Dharuk include the names of now internationally-known animals, such as dingo, wallaby, wombat, and koala. The first and most famous borrowing, kangaroo, has long been a matter of debate in terms of its origin. Unlike the others, it did not originate from the Dharuk language, but was encountered by the crew of Captain James Cook during contact with the Guugu Yimidhirr people in 1770, when Cook’s ship the Endeavor was beached for repairs near modern north Queensland. One famous theory claims that an Endeavor crew member pointed at the animal, and an Aboriginal replied something like “kangaroo,” which translated not as the animal’s name but as something like “I don’t understand what you’re asking.” Whatever the term originally meant, the name stuck. In addition to the animal, the word has become a symbol for Australia, used to refer to members of Australia’s international rugby team, to Australian soldiers during both world wars, and in the creation of a wide range of compounds (i.e. ‘kangaroo bar’).

Other popular borrowings include the slang term bung, originally from the Dharuk language via Sydney pidgin English, meaning dead, useless, or broken; cooee, a shout used to attract attention or find missing people; hard yakka, meaning hard work, derived from yakka in the Jagera language; billabong, meaning “dead river” and now the name of a global surf clothing brand; and boomerang, whose exact origins are unknown but refers to an Aboriginal hunting tool which has also become a popular toy and symbol of Australia. Many names for the local fish and birds are also borrowings (and many are onomatopoeic, imitative of the birds’ calls), such as currawong, while others were adapted from English names for similar birds (i.e. magpie). In the same way many American borrowings from Indian languages became localized in use or obsolete, the use of Aboriginal terms in Australian English had long been dwindling; however, the usage of Aboriginal terms has been slowly rising since the 1980s. In 2016, the Australian National Dictionary listed around 500 words in common usage from 100 different Aboriginal languages, up from 400 words from 80 languages in 2008, and 250 words from 60 languages in 1988.

Separate from the Aboriginal languages is Australian Aboriginal English (AAE), a dialect of Australian English used by a large section of the Indigenous Australian population, which has a number of varieties that have developed in different parts of Australia. AAE does not make use of auxiliary verbs such as “to be” and “to have,” and the masculine pronouns he and him may also be used for females and inanimate objects, particularly in northern Australia. Several slang words used by young Australian Aboriginal English speakers have begun to spread to Australian English speakers, such as deadly to mean “excellent” or “good” (in the same way wicked is used) and dardy, meaning “cool.”

American English has also been a big influence on Australian English, particularly since World War II and the expanded international influence of American media, entertainment, and pop culture. Some North American borrowings, such as bushranger, phoney, and squatter, have been so thoroughly integrated they are thought to be of Australian origin. Australians overall seem to be less concerned with the impact of adapting American terminology upon national cohesion. However, studies have shown Australian borrowings from American English to be selective and often readapted for other purposes.

In addition to borrowings from indigenous languages and American English, Australian English has coined a large number of its own words, some of which descend from older British dialects, and in particular, working-class and prison slang. Some of the most popular and important of these have to do with fairness and hard work. A battler is a person who works hard to make a decent living in difficult circumstances, while its opposite is the derogatory bludger, a person who expects another person to do all the work. Related to these terms in dinkum or fair dinkum, which originally meant “work” or “a fair share or work,” evolved to mean “above board” or “true,” and is now used to mean “true” or “is that true?” (among other things depending on context and inflection). The term fair go also arose as an Australian principle, referring to the lack of formal class distinctions in Australia and the importance of fair play and equality of opportunity.

One of the most famous phrases associated with the Australian dialect is “shrimp on the barbie,” thanks to a series of Australian tourism commercials in the 1980s and a 1990 movie of the same name (with “barbie” in this case referring to barbecue). Such diminutives are a core feature of the Australian dialect. With over 5000 recorded, Australians use more abbreviations and diminutives than any other English speakers. Common uses include: arvo (afternoon), footy (football), sunnies (sunglasses), rego (registration), servo (service station), brekkie (breakfast), cuppa (cup of tea) and sanga (sandwich). Brand names are not exempt, such as Maccas for McDonald’s, Blunnies (Blundstone boots), Subie (Subaru) and Suzy (Suzuki), nor are new technologies: lappy (laptop), webby (webcam), remi (remote control) and mobes (mobile phone). Unsurprisingly, the now internationally-popular term selfie originated in Australia.

While such hypocoristics exist in many dialects of English, they are particularly frequent in Australian English and considered one of its major differentiators, with one estimate finding that these forms make up 4% of the Australian lexis. In an elicitation study, Kidd, Kemp, and Quinn (2011) asked 115 speakers of Australian English to generate as many hypocoristic forms as they could in 10 minutes, and reported more than 1,500 different forms. Diminutives are no modern degradation, but rather a long tradition with examples going back to the 1800s. Use is common even in formal contexts such as by politicians and journalists, and some hypocoristic forms are now more common than their standard forms, such as uni for university and Salvos for Salvation Army. This pervasive use of diminutives has generally been interpreted to reflect core Australian cultural ideals of informality and egalitarianism, as they sound more informal and relaxed, and usage is reinforced as a marker of in-group identity and a shared cultural history.

Australian is a non-rhotic (r-less) variety of English, meaning the /ɹ/ sound does not appear at the end of a syllable or immediately before a consonant. As with most dialects of English, it is distinguished primarily by its vowel phonology. The Australian English vowels /ɪ/, /e/ and /eː/ are noticeably closer, pronounced with a higher tongue position, than their Received Pronunciation equivalents. Like General American, General Australian has completed the weak vowel merger, which is the loss of contrast between /ə/ (schwa) and unstressed /ɪ/, that occurs in certain dialects of English. Most speakers of Australian English replace the unstressed weak /ɪ/ with schwa, although where there is a following /k/, as in paddock or nomadic, some speakers maintain the contrast, while some who have the merger use [ɪ] as the merged vowel. While relatively homogenous, there is some regional variation with phonology, including the celery-salary merger in Victoria (where the words celery and salary sound the same), and differences in the distribution of the trap-bath split. In the trap-bath split, the lengthened vowel in words such as bath, laugh, grass, and chance, which in RP is pronounced as a broad A or long A [ɑː], is pronounced more near the front of the mouth ([ɐː] or[aː]). Australian English has also diverged from Cockney since the settling of Australia in the use of a glottal stop where a /t/ would be found, in th-fronting, and in h-dropping. In terms of intonation, the variable that has been most extensively investigated is the “Australian questioning intonation,” or AQI (also known generally as high rising intonation, high rising terminal, or rising intonation), where declarative clauses end with a rising intonation. The AQI began to appear in the 1970s, and there is general agreement among linguists that the function of AQI is to seek verification of the listener’s comprehension. As with American English, but unlike British English, collective nouns are almost always singular in construction. However, Australian spelling is closer to British than American spelling. As with British spelling, the u is retained in words such as colour, honour, labour and favour.

Evolving from a mix of transplanted local English dialects, then interacting with indigenous Aboriginal and migrant languages, American English, and other global varieties of English, Australian English has emerged as a unique dialect expressing Australian national identity values. While it shares much of its phonology and grammar with the other major varieties of “settler English,” Australian English manifests uniquely egalitarian and anti-authoritarian leanings based in its underclass past, a pervasive relaxed informality, a wry understated humor, a desire for fairness, and a set of distinctive vocabulary drawn from the island’s original Aboriginal inhabitants.

Bibliography

Baker, Sidney J. The Australian language; an examination of the English language and English speech as used in Australia, from convict days to the present, with special reference to the growth of indigenous idiom and its use by Australian writers. Sydney: Currawong Publishing Co., 1966. Print.

Bragg, Melvyn. The Adventure of English: the Biography of a Language. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2011. Print.

Kidd, E., Kemp, N. & Quinn, S. (2011). “Did you have a choccie bickie this arvo? A quantitative look at Australian hypocoristics.” Language Sciences, vol 33, no. 3, pp. 359-368. DOI: 10.1016/j.langsci.2010.11.006

Koch, H., & Nordlinger, R. (Eds.). (2014). The Languages and Linguistics of Australia : A Comprehensive Guide. De Gruyter, Inc., 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/sou/detail.action?docID=1075528.

Kortmann, B., & Lunkenheimer, K. (Eds.). (2012). The Mouton World Atlas of Variation in English. De Gruyter, Inc., 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/sou/detail.action?docID=894066.

Moore, Bruce. “The English of Australia | Oxford Dictionaries.” Oxford Dictionaries | English, Oxford Dictionaries, en.oxforddictionaries.com/explore/varieties-of-english/the-english-of-australia.

Ramson, W.S. Australian English. Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1966. Print.

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An Interview with Kory Stamper, author of WORD BY WORD

Posted on March 21, 2018 by Ed Battistella
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Kory Stamper grew up in Colorado and graduated from Smith College with a degree in medieval studies. She is a lexicographer who was on staff at Merriam-Webster from 1998 to 2018.

Her debut book Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries was relased in hardcover in 2017 and is now available in paperback.

Writing in the New Yorker, Adrienne Raphel called Word By Word “Both memoir and exposé, an insider’s tour of the inner circles of the mysterious fortress that is Merriam-Webster,” adding that “Stamper leads us through her own lexicographical bildungsroman, exploring how she fell in love with words and showing us how the dictionary works, and how it interacts with the world that it strives to reflect.”

Kory Stamper has written and appeared in the “Ask the Editor” video series at Merriam-Webster, and she has been a contributor to The Washington Post, The Guardian, and The New York Times.

You can find her blog at harmlessdrudgery.com and follow her on Twitter.

Ed Battistella: I really enjoyed Word By Word, especially the stories of the individual words and description of the process of lexicography itself. It had not occurred to me that there was an extensive training. What was that training like?

Kory Stamper: You know that scene at the beginning of Disney’s “Alice in Wonderland” where Alice and her cat Dinah follow the White Rabbit into a hole in a tree trunk, and as Alice says “Curiosity can lead to trouble,” she falls down the rabbithole into Wonderland? And as she tumbles down, she waves goodbye up at Dinah? That’s what training is like mentally, only fewer cats are involved.

Essentially, the training you get as a lexicographer is designed to make you unlearn everything you have learned about English. You re-learn grammar, you re-learn what meaning is, you even learn how to read differently. It can be very disorienting, but if you’re the right kind of nerd, also really exciting. You come into this work thinking of language as a fixed, almost inviolate thing, and you quickly discover that it’s a living, moving entity with its own will and history and direction. That’s both freeing and terrifying.

EB: Do you remember the first word you got to define? How did that feel?

KS: By the time I was actually put to work on a dictionary, I had written so many practice definitions that I don’t remember what the first word I defined was. I do remember that “body English” was in one of those early batches of real defining, and I was pretty pleased with the definition that I had come up with (which currently reads “bodily motions made in a usually unconscious effort to influence the progress of a propelled object (as a ball)”).

EB: What’s the toughest word you’ve worked on?

KS: “God.” Absolutely, without a doubt. I had to revise the entry for the Unabridged Dictionary, and one of the first things I discovered was that the word “god” was used pretty vaguely in print, which doesn’t give the lexicographer much to work on. So much of the written evidence was stuff like “humanity’s conception of God is inadequate,” which tells me exactly bubkes about what the word “God” means in that sentence.

Lexicographers talk a lot about the difference between lexical defining and real defining. Real defining is the attempt to explain the essential nature of a thing—what is truth, what is beauty. Lexical defining is the attempt to explain what the word which signifies a thing means in particular contexts—what does “beauty” mean in the sentence, “That car’s a real beauty.” We do lexical defining and not real defining. But a word like “god” makes that tightrope even thinner and harder to navigate. Can I say that the word “god” means “a being,” or should I use “a deity”? What about “a spirit”? Can I use the word “omnipotent” in the definition which is meant to cover the Abrahamic religious uses of “god,” or should I fudge it because I have just run across a theological debate about whether or not the Abrahamic God is actually omnipotent? Should I capitalize the word?

In the end, it took me four months of nonstop work to revise the entry, and while I feel like I did as good as job as anyone who is tasked with defining “god” could do, I’m nonetheless sure that there’s something unintentional in that entry that has condemned me to an unpleasant afterlife destination. Occupational hazard!

EB: I was fascinated to many of the backstories of particular bits of lexicography, like the interesting discovery about irregardless. Can you explain that one for our readers?

KS: I came into this job knowing, on a molecular level and like everyone else, that “irregardless” wasn’t a word. So imagine my surprise when I discovered that this nonword was entered into dictionaries! As I researched more about how it ended up in our dictionaries, I found that when it first showed up in writing, it was unremarkable—only later was it tarred and feathered as “uneducated” or “illiterate.” That happened during a point in American history when we were giving more lexical weight to the types of English spoken by affluent city dwellers, and we were condemning the types of English spoken by rural communities. “Irregardless” was one of the words that was caught in the crossfire, though there is evidence of its use among highly educated speakers.

I actually came to have a deep respect for “irregardless”: here’s a word that everyone despises, that everyone says is illogical or ugly or not a word, that has, in spite of everything, hung out on the periphery of English for more than 200 years. It’s a word that no one will cop to using, but which still has enough written historical and current use to merit entry into a dictionary. I don’t use it myself, but I no longer look askance at people who do.

EB: What’s on your radar now, word-wise?

KS: I just wrote a piece on the squishiness of the meaning and use of “intersectionality,” which isn’t a new word but feels new to many people. Today I wondered if “Novichok” was a trademark and if you’d use it as a bare noun (“poisoned with Novichok”) or as an attributive noun (“poisoned with Novichok nerve agent”). And I’ve started noticing the use of “blockchain for” more recently: “blockchain for legal references,” “blockchain for science,” “blockchain for social good.”

EB: How has your work as a lexicographer affected you as a writer? Do you think about using words in novel ways when you write?

KS: Absolutely. This work makes you aware of how flexible and fluid language is, and as a lexicographer, you live inside the language in a different way. You get to see and enter into the vocabularic nooks and crannies of English in a way that most people don’t. I’m sure there are plenty of lexicographers who can maintain a professional distance from the material, but I’m not one of them. So I found, while I was writing Word by Word, that I kept unearthing these little lexical treasures, and I couldn’t help but present them to the reader like a sugared-up toddler on a walk: lookit this! Lookit this! Handing the reader weird rocks and twigs and hollering at them “Isn’t this wonderful and amazing?”

EB: Do you have any advice for young people trying to break in to lexicography?

KS: The field is, honestly, shrinking. We used to have a letter that we’d give to prospective lexicographers that essentially said that getting a job writing dictionaries was a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Now I think it’s a matter of being ahead of the right place and the right time, of really thinking about and pressing into what dictionaries could be instead of what they are. For example, Dictionary.com just added a few emoji to their online dictionary, which I think is brilliant. Emoji can be used lexically, just like words; they have register and different connotations depending on context and even which device you’re using; and people are likely to run across them online, in social media, in texts, on Slack—basically, in the new type of public-private writing that has emerged as more of our lives are lived online. Emoji is one new place that the language has gone that traditional lexicographers have pooh-poohed as faddish or nonlexical. Maybe emoji will fade away—but there are plenty of language trends that the traditional lexicographers of the 1700s and 1800s thought would flourish or fade away that haven’t.

EB: I know that from time to time lexicographers are called upon to answer reader mail. What’s the oddest bit of mail you’ve gotten?

KS: My favorite bit of weirdness was a poem or freestyle that had nothing to do with words, but was instead about a character named Mr. Baby Burper and his adventures. I don’t remember the whole email, but it definitely had flow: “I’m Mr. Baby Burper, I burp all the babies in the eternity in harmony with all the ladies, I just pat my hand on my leg and say burpady burpady burpady.” It went on from there. It was the most amazing email I had ever read, and it definitely won me some tchotchkes from Marketing back when we had a National Poetry Month celebration.

EB: I’ve also really enjoyed the Merriam-Webster “Ask the Editor” videos, which I sometimes play for my students to show them that I’m not making things up. How did that idea come about?

KS: Our former Director of Marketing came up with the idea. We already had other formats in which we could share discoveries about words, but they were all written, and she thought that sharing that information via video would be great. I believe that she initially put out a call to all the editors, asking if anyone would be interested, and she got exactly zero replies: you’re asking a bunch of introverts to talk on camera? In the end, she asked three of us that she knew had done publicity for the company, or had outside public speaking experience.

Early on, we were just encouraged to share whatever we thought was noteworthy or winsome about the language. Each of us came up with topics that seemed intriguing, or that answered questions that we each had gotten a number of times. The things that people responded to floored us. Who knew that my pasty face and knowledge of 18th-century grammatical movements would launch a resurgence in the use of the plural “octopodes”? I sure didn’t.

EB: Are you working on another book?

KS: I am! I’m writing a nonfiction book about the historical quest to define color. It touches on art and war and secret identities and dictionaries, and in the process of writing and researching it, I’ve turned back into that sugared-up toddler: lookit! Lookit! This is amazing!

EB: Thanks for talking with us.

KS: Thanks so much for asking!

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An Interview with George Dohrmann, author of SUPERFANS

Posted on March 14, 2018 by Ed Battistella
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Pulitzer Prize-winning writer George Dohrmann graduated from Notre Dame in 1995 with a B.A. in American Studies and later earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of San Francisco. He has worked at the Los Angeles Times, the St. Paul Pioneer Press in Minnesota, and Sports Illustrated, and he is currently a senior editor and writer for The Athletic. In addition, he has taught journalism at UC-Berkeley, Santa Clara University and Southern Oregon University. Dohrmann lives in Ashland.

He is the author of Play Their Hearts Out: A Coach, His Star Recruit, and the Youth Basketball Machine, , which won the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing, the Award for Excellence in Coverage of Youth Sports, and was Amazon’s pick as the best sports book of 2010.

His latest book is Superfans: Into the Heart of Obsessive Sports Fandom, published in 2018 by Random House. Publishers Weekly says Superfans “gives soul to a much maligned and misunderstood aspect of sports.”

Ed Battistella: What prompted you to write Superfans?

George Dohrmann: I’ve been a sportswriter for more than 20 years and have had so many interactions with fans, good and bad. And in the last few years, with the explosion in popularity of social media, we see and hear from fans more and more. I felt like that while I was interacting with a lot of people who are diehard fans, I didn’t really understand why they were so devoted to their team, why they might do things that I would probably never do, even having been involved with sports in different ways most of my life. It really started with the simple idea that I should know more about the people who are consuming my work and out there in the world I cover.

EB: Would you consider yourself a superfan?

GD: When I was younger I was certainly a superfan of Notre Dame, where I went to school, but that has faded. Now, the only team I would say that about is the United State’s men’s national soccer team. That is the one team that I follow very closely and I will schedule my life around games.

EB: How do people become sports fans and then superfans?

GD: Most people become fans of a specific team because a parent or sibling is a fan of that team. It can happen other ways but that is the most common. Some people then make transition from casual fan to what I called superfans. In my book, the people profiled often ramped up their fandom at transition points in their lives, like when they got out of the military or got divorced or relocated to a new city for a job. That makes sense. People at a transition point are forming a new identity and they chose to dedicate some of who they are to being a fan of a specific team.

EB: What happens if you are a superfan and your team keeps losing?

GD: Well, studies show that very little happens. Researchers who study fans use a term, CORFing, which stands for Cutting Off Reflected Failure, to describe people who are tired of losing and so, to protect their self-esteem, they cut off some or all of their fandom. But that is not common. Most people will do things to protect their self-esteem from the blows of consistent losing, like lowering expectations for the team, but they won’t quit on their team entirely. It is too big a part of who they are to walk away, and even rooting for a loser can become, in a way, part of their identity and something they take pride in They can always say they are not a fair-weather fan.

EB: You talk about kids and fandom. Should parents involve young kids in fandom?

GD: Because of how big fandom is in some people’s lives, it would be very difficult for them to not show that side of themselves to their children, to hide this huge part of their identity. So, it is probably not a question of should people introduce kids into fandom but how they do it. Young kids want to see the world in black and white, so if you tell them: “Oregon is good and Oregon St is bad” or convey that in some other way they are going to embrace that almost too strongly. They might think of anyone who went to Oregon State as bad. They don’t understand nuance or have perspective at a young age. Also, sports fandom has a way of teaching kids to hate. Again, if you say you “hate” the Beavers, they will too. I think parents should minimize exposure to really passionate displays of fandom and also be careful with some of the words that are inherent in extreme fandom. When I am watching a game, my kids always ask: “Who are we rooting for?” Most of the time I tell them: “No one. We are just enjoying the game.” I want them to learn to watch because it can be pleasurable to see great athletes perform.

EB: You attended the Sports Psychology Forum to talk with academics researching fans. What was that experience like?

GD: It was a blast. It is so small-timey, and the handful of academics there know it and they sort of celebrate their irrelevance. We played mini-golf; we watched a lot of sports; we smelled Kentucky sweatshirts sprayed with deer urine (seriously). I learned a ton about how fans think because the researchers there are smart and passionate folks.

EB: What sports seems to have the most obsessive fans? And what sports have the least?

GD: I think college sports, especially football, have probably the most obsessive fans. That’s just an observation; there is no research showing that. College football fans (think Alabama fans or Ohio State or Georgia or Texas or a similar school) are indoctrinated at a very young age. Devotion to that school is something that runs in the family, and they are also often surrounded by others who are as devoted to that school. It leads to a strong connection.

EB: Can fandom go too far?

GD: Absolutely. Someone can become addicted. You’d look for any of the markers of addiction, like is their fandom negatively impacting their job or relationships or financial situation. There are clinical psychologists who treat fans for addiction. That said, most fans are doing fine and even the ones you might see on TV and think are crazy – many of whom I profile in the book – are normal people with very stable lives who are positive members of society.

EB: How have sports fans responded to the book?

GD: One of the more interesting reactions has been people complaining that I didn’t profile a fan or fan group related to their favorite team. I love that because it is the reaction of a superfan, someone for whom a team is such a huge part of their identity they can’t read a book about fans and not think: Why not my team? That is exactly the kind of behavior that made me want to write this book in the first place.

EB: Thanks for talking with us. I’m a fan of your book—in a good way.

GD: Thanks so much.

Visit George Dohrmann’s website http://georgedohrmann.com/ and follow him on Twitter at https://twitter.com/georgedohrmann.

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I’m Lovin’ It; But Should I Be? a guest post by Ethan Arlt

Posted on February 9, 2018 by Ed Battistella
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Ethan Arlt is a graduate student in his first year of the Masters in Teaching program at SOU. He grew up in Southern California, and completed an undergrad degree in Business and Creative Writing at the University of Oregon. He loves it here in Southern Oregon. In his spare time, he likes to hike, write poetry, and play volleyball and board games.

“Love” is a strange, complicated word. In some respects, it is frivolous (McDonald’s, “I’m lovin’ it”) and in other contexts, such as between partners, it can be one of the most powerful expressions of affection toward one another (“I love you”). How can these two very separate instances be connected by a simple word? What could be the dangers and implications of loading such a semantically powerful word with so many meanings? In this paper, I will seek to understand the meanings of the word “love” by tracings its history of meaning and comparing it to one of its most similar counterparts, “like;” in doing so, I will seek to understand the implications of its widespread use in media, especially advertisements, and the potential dangers associated with using “love” when it relates to products or brands.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “love,” comes from multiple origins, and multiple meanings; the noun form traces its origins to Old Frisian, Old Saxon, Old High German, and also Gothic, and the verb form derives much of its use from Old English. Evidently, the word has a variety of origins, which match up with its variety of meanings. There are many root words, and therefore many meanings, some overlapping, so for the purposes of understanding the complexity of the word, I will highlight the root meanings that I feel are most pertinent and contain a semantically significant meaning. Some of these meanings of the noun form include: inclination, piety, willingness, hopefulness, agreeableness, friendship, and the pleasure one experiences for or through an act of goodwill. Its verb form consists of meanings such as: to desire, to cherish, and to become dear. Likewise, the current definitions reflect this array of meaning, as the primary definitions for the noun form include: senses relating to affection or attachment, affection toward a spiritual ideal or entity, a strong liking of something, and an intense passionate feeling toward something or someone (often including sexual desire). Most notably, the verb form contains meanings such as: “to show love towards…to caress..,” to love reciprocally, and “To have a strong liking for…to be devoted or addicted to” (Love, n.1.). While the most common definition seems to relate to the idea of desiring and cherishing, what’s interesting is what sets “love” apart from “like” – the idea of love as connected to piety, that it can be action, that love can be addictive, and that love is a form of reciprocal trust .

To further understand the complex idea of love, researcher Robert Sternberg delineates the word into three separate marking components: Intimacy, Passion, and Commitment. From each one, he describes eight different types of love, based on whether the three previously mentioned categories are fulfilled. These types include Nonlove, Liking, Infatuated Love, Empty Love, Romantic Love, Companionate Love, Fatuous Love, and Consummate Love, which represents the most “complete form” in which all three aspects of love are represented (Sternberg & Weis 119). Sternberg’s definition of love then attempts to break down the word, however it only does so in a relational, person-to-person sense, as the word still maintains its connotations of piety, and generalized feelings of inclination toward an object or brand. What’s interesting in Sternberg’s definition is the idea of commitment. To include commitment into the three categories of love is to elevate and highlight this notion that to love implies a bonding, one that persists over time. If a person is to love something, that person’s commitment toward it is just as important (definition-wise) as that person’s feelings of intimacy and passion toward it. Again, this is developed mostly for a person-to-person relational sense, but its implications should not be understated, as they may impact the efficacy of the word’s use, especially in marketing situations.

In Sternberg’s model, “liking” is included as a form of love, but it is absent of those important qualities of passion and commitment. In a purely definitional sense, too, it only relates to an indication of similarity (“I like to be around like-minded people), and overlaps with love in how it indicates agreeability or pleasure (“I really like that chocolate”) (Like, n.1.). “Like” is often used as a precursor to love, and it seems we also have the capacity to love without liking (“I don’t like my brother, but I still love him”), perhaps by hitting either one or both of the passion and commitment aspects of Sternberg’s model. What then can these slight differences tell us about the power of the word, and also about the effect of its usage?

In his study, Zick Rubin sheds light on this issue. He also attempted to define love, but chose to do by comparing it to “like.” People we like, he found, are those that we have admiration for, appreciate their company, and want to do things with. The connection for loving, however, had some other, deeper connotations. He found that couples in “love” tended to gaze into each other’s eyes more, included desires for contact and intimacy, and also included caring about the loved one’s needs as if they were one’s own (Rubin 265). Rubin’s research then highlights and confirms one of the important differentiations, which is also touched on in the formal definitions – love is not only a process of attachment, but when we attach via love, we are connected to the desires and needs of the other. In this way, love is a reciprocal act, as opposed to liking, which is absent of this kind of reciprocity. This idea of reciprocity also has the implications of action. If one is to care about another’s needs as much as one’s own, then this could be a prelude to loving action. Love, then, as opposed to like, carries more inclination toward action.

There is, along with an action-orientation to the word, also a connection to trust. In their study, Hatfield and Rapson distinguished and two types of love – passionate love, and companionate love. Passionate love is love that begins with intense feelings of emotion, as well as sexual attraction. Companionate love, on the other hand, is love that is based on mutual respect, caring and affection, and trust. Essentially, then, semantically, love can connote both a feeling of energy, and also of long-term trust (Hatfield & Rapson). Love then, unlike its pseudo-synonym “like,” is not simply a word of agreeability or sameness, it connotes commitment, energy, action, reciprocity, and trust.

If this is true, then how can we begin to understand the word’s usage in our current everyday lives, and the effect it might have? On a micro-scale, its overuse has the potential to dilute its meaning. If the word is frequently used in its sense of agreeability, it has the potential to reduce its meaning when its other connotations are needed most, in conveying the deepest form of affection for another. On a broader scale, we can postulate and examine the influence that the usage of this word might have on people as it connects to brands and objects.

In her book, Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel, Jean Kilbourne discusses this very effect; she states, “Advertising encourages us not only to objectify each other, but also to feel that our most significant relationships are with the products we buy. It turns lovers into things and things into lovers and encourages us to feel passion for our products rather than our partners. Passion for products is especially dangerous when the products are potentially addictive, because addicts do feel that they are in a relationship with those products” (Kilbourne 27). These kinds of connections of loving relationships to brands are prominent. Take for example, McDonald’s popular slogan “I’m lovin’ it.” Because of those various connotations with love – trust, action, attachment – through its use of language, the brand is subtly developing a relationship with the audience. It’s not simply that the brand is agreeable or enjoyable; rather, the slogan encourages the audience to feel connected to the brand on a deeper level, to care about its well-being, and to take action to ensure that well-being.

One study proves that people can indeed feel a type of love toward a brand (and that love is delineated into multiple aspects), as it shows that both US and French consumers show aspects of love toward brands, specifically in the realms of passion and pleasure. However, what’s interesting to note is that French consumers relate to their brands by saying they “like” or “adore” them, while American consumers explicitly use the word “love.” In the same study, French consumers were more likely to align with the memory (inciting positive nostalgia) and trust aspects of their relationship to the brand, while American consumers were more likely say they feel attached to a brand (Albert, Noel, Merunka, & Valette-Florence 13). While this data is not entirely conclusive, it is interesting to note “love’s” usage toward brands in the US, as opposed to the French words such as “like” and “adore,” and what implications that might have for what level of attachment (or addiction) we have to our products. It is entirely possible that “like” and “adore” connote different meanings, and therefore foster a different kind of brand relationship.

Love, then, is evidently a semantically powerful word, connected to action, trust, and deep attachment. Because of its power, it seems worth considering its current usage, especially in forms of media and advertisement; it is a word that can be so ambiguous, so apparently surface-level, and yet, one that we desperately need to describe our deepest affections.

Works Cited

Albert, Noel, Dwight Merunka, and Pierre Valette-Florence. “When consumers love their brands: Exploring the concept and its dimensions.” Journal of Business research 61.10 (2008): 1062-1075.

Hatfield, Elaine, and Richard L. Rapson. Love, sex, and intimacy: Their psychology, biology, and history. HarperCollins College Publishers, 1993.

Kilbourne, Jean. Can’t buy my love: How advertising changes the way we think and feel. Simon and Schuster, 2012.

“Like, n.1.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, June 2017,

www.oed.com/view/Entry/46809760. Accessed 26 November 2017. “Love, n.1.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, June 2017, www.oed.com/view/Entry/110566. Accessed 26 November 2017.

Rubin, Zick. “Measurement of romantic love.” Journal of personality and social psychology 16.2 (1970): 265.

Sternberg, Robert J., and Karin Weis, eds. The new psychology of love. Yale University Press, 2006.

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