In my last post, I gave Prince as an example of a Minneapolis native with a lovely accent. Prince is black, and you can hear it in his voice because there are at least two different kinds of Minneapolis accent, due in part to segregation. But he doesn’t just have a black accent, he has a Minneapolis black accent. There’s also a Minneapolis white accent, and maybe a Minneapolis Hmong accent too.

One concept that I’ve found extremely valuable in recent years is the notion of “punching up.” I first encountered it in the context of rape jokes, but it applies to jokes about race and ethnicity, and really any joke that affects different groups of people disproportionately.

As Josef Fruehwald pointed out, attitudes towards language often are proxy for the attitudes towards the people who speak those languages. This is a case of what John Earl Joseph termed “prestige transfer,” and it makes sense.

Science is objective, but scientists tend to like things they study; in a notable scene from the 2008 adaptation of Journey to the Center of the Earth, the characters emerge into a cave. One exclaims, “Diamonds!” another “Emeralds!” And then Trevor the geologist (played by Brendan Fraser) remarks, “Feldspar!” It’s natural for geologists to delight in rocks, and it’s natural for linguists to delight in languages.

I think it was an important move for linguists to divorce our field from aesthetics. There can be a science of taste, but science itself is not the arbiter of taste. It is not the place of linguists to judge accents or languages. Just as biologists study animals and plants that many people consider repugnant, linguists may study words and phrases that alarm or disgust people. That said, objectivity doesn’t mean you have to like everything.

One thing I have to mention at this point: It’s okay to not like an accent. This is a matter of taste. You like what you like, and you dislike what you dislike. If you think an accent is ugly, or lovely, that’s completely your prerogative. On the other hand, patterns of likes and dislikes can be telling. If all the accents you dislike are from cities, maybe you’ve got something against cities or the people who live in them.

In his post about Gawker’s “America’s Ugliest Accent” series, Joseph Fruehwald notes, “Predictably, the kinds of accents and languages which get dumped on the most, and get branded the ‘ugliest,’ always wind up being spoken by socially disadvantaged people.” And that’s really the ugliest thing about this Gawker gimmick: it’s pretty much the epitome of punching down.

Josef Fruehwald has some well-thought-out criticism of Gawker’s latest hate-fest, “America’s Ugliest Accent.” He concludes: “At the risk of coming off as a slacktivist, I’d encourage you all to be the change you want to see in the world, and say something nice about an accent today, even if it’s just your own.” I was actually thinking, as I looked at the Gawker bracket, how much I like some of these accents.

Human evolution has been in the news quite a lot recently. New genetic data suggest that ancient humans included both Neanderthals and Denisovans, which colonized different parts of the world but subsequently interbred with so-called modern humans and left telltale traces of this history in the genomes of living humans.

Thinking about fitness landscapes can stimulate detailed discussion and consideration of the meanings and limitations of such metaphors, and my introductory comments at The Panda's Thumb did just that. Most notably, Joe Felsenstein pointed us to the various ways these depictions can be employed, and urged everyone to use caution in interpreting them.