Tadpole

Annotated Cover Copy

Sometimes, no matter how well-meaning the editor or publicist, cover copy gets a little lost in the shuffle. This was one of those times.

When Chinese shopkeepers tried to find a written equivalent of Coca-Cola, one set of characters they chose was pronounced “ke-kou ke-la.” It sounded right, but it literally translated as “bite the wax tadpole.” [The written equivalent, of course, was for the name Coca-Cola.]

~~Language, like travel, is always stranger than we expect and often more beautiful than we imagine.~~ [This is actually a direct quote from the book. But out of context it reads like a DeBeers ad. Sorry about that.] In Biting the Wax Tadpole, Elizabeth Little takes a decidedly unstuffy and accessible tour of grammar via the languages of the world—from Lithuanian ~~noun declensions and imperfective Russian verbs~~ and Zulu to Ancient Greek and Navajo. [Your lack of parallelism disturbs me.] And in one of the most courageous acts in the history of popular grammar books, she ~~attempts to provide~~provides an explanation of verbal aspect that people might actually understand. [The explanation is there; it's the success of said explanation that's in question. But I appreciate the vote of confidence!] Other difficult and pressing questions addressed in Biting the Wax Tadpole include:

Just what, exactly, the Swedish names of IKEA products mean.

Why Icelandic speakers must decide if the numbers 1-4 are plural.

~~How Theodor Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss) was able to take an otherwise unexceptional pair of breakfast foods and turn them into literary fodder for generations~~ [This has nothing to do with foreign languages and everything to do with an incredibly passing and unfunny aside. Deleted.]

Why many people mistakenly believe Joanie Loves Chachi was Korea’s highest rated television show ever. [Sigh.]

~~Why Basque grammar seems downright kooky to just about anyone who isn’t a native speaker.~~ [So ... every grammar seems kooky to a non-native speaker. Basque is just extra strange, see, because .... well, I'd tell you more, but as Chris Parnell once said: "It's in the book."]

A Taste of Tadpole

I’m often at a bit of a loss when describing Biting the Wax Tadpole: Is it reference? Is it non-fiction? Is it humor? If it were up to me, I’d shelve it alongside all those other books of tall tales and trivia that tend to end up next to the toilet. But it isn’t up to me. And in fact I’ve been asked specifically not to mention toilets in conjunction with this book. Which is a shame, really, because I think toilets could be a real marketing force.

But for this reason, I’ve decided to skip categorization altogether and present excerpts instead.

I recommend printing it out and putting it with the toilet paper.

A particularly unusual feature of Guaraní is its use of tense—but not with relation to verbs, with relation to nouns. Guaraní nouns can be marked with two different endings, –kue or –ra. Kue is a past-tense marker (similar to the English prefix
ex-), and ra is a future-tense marker. So if you consider the word for “president,” mburuvicha, then Bill Clinton is a mburuvichakue, and Barack Obama is a possible mburuvichara. You can also combine the endings: mburuvicharangue means “what we thought was going to be a future president but then turned out not to be.” In other words: Al Gore.

(Note: this was written in the spring of 2007; I’m thrilled that Barack Obama is now a full-fledged mburuvicha.)

Common nouns aren’t the only nouns subject to considerations of case. Proper names, too, get the grammatical treatment. Which is all well and good until parents decide that they want their kids to be special. And then all of a sudden, schoolteachers around the country have to struggle to figure out the genitive of Suri, Shiloh, Kal-El. Iceland, for one, is having none of it. If you want to use a nontraditional baby name in Iceland, you must first pass it by the Icelandic Naming Committee. New names can’t contain any non-Icelandic letters, and they have to be amenable to Icelandic declension patterns. And if the Committee turns down your request, you’re shit out of luck. If you’re a celebrity interested in emigrating to Iceland, consider yourself forewarned.

The single most widely cited example of a foreign-language marketing foul-up comes at the expense of Chevrolet, which introduced the Chevy Nova in Mexico in 1972. As the story goes, sales of the new model were anemic due to the fact that Nova sounds a

great deal like the Spanish no va, or “doesn’t go.” It would be a cute story—if it were true. In reality, “Nova” was no more mistaken for no va than “noble” is for “no bull,” and sales were just fine. That’s not to say that General Motors has a perfect record when it comes to translation. In 2003, GM was forced to rename the Buick La Crosse in Canada when it was discovered that the name also happened to be Quebecois slang—for masturbation.

(Illustrations by Ayumi Piland)