Bones to Ashes

“Do you ever want to see your precious little girl again? Put $10,000 cash in a diaper bag. Put it in the green trash kan on the devil strip at corner 18th and Carlson. Don’t bring anybody along. No kops! Come alone! I’ll be watching you all the time. Anyone with you, deal is off and dautter is dead!”

“One of the first things linguists look for is the underlying language. Is the person a native English speaker? If not, there may be mistaken cognates, words that look like they should mean the same in both languages but don’t. Like ‘gift’ in German means ‘poison’ in English.”

“Embarazada in Spanish.” I’d made that mistake once in Puerto Rico. Instead of saying I was embarrassed, I’d said I was pregnant.

“ Good one. Systematic misspellings can also show a foreign native language. Notice that in the note the writer misspelled ‘kan’ and ‘kops’ for ‘can’ and ‘cops.’ But not ‘kash’ for ‘cash,’ or ‘korner’ for ‘corner.’ So it probably wasn’t that the writer was educated in a language where the k sound was always spelled k and never c. And over all, the note’s pretty fluent.”

“So the writer’s an English speaker, not pregnant, who can’t spell ‘trash can.’ How did Shuy know he was educated?”

“Keep looking at the spellings. He can’t spell ‘daughter’ either, right?”

“Right. But he can spell ‘precious.’ And ‘diaper.’ And his punctuation is correct, not like someone’s who can’t spell ‘cops.’”

“I knew you’d get this immediately. In essence, it’s the same thing you do in your job. Look for patterns that fit and don’t fit. So if the perp can spell, why doesn’t he?”

“To throw the cops off. Maybe in his community he’s known as well educated. So instead of hiding his education, his attempt at concealing it sends up a flare. But what about Akron? Why not Cleveland? Or Cincinnati?”

“Read the note again. What words stand out?”

“‘Devil strip.’”

“What’s your word for the grass strip between the sidewalk and the road?”

I thought about it. “No idea.”

“Most people haven’t a word for it. Or if they do, it’s a local one. County strip. Median strip.”

“Devil strip,” I guessed.

“But only in Akron. Not even in Toledo or Columbus. But no one’s aware. Who ever talks about devil strips? You still with me?”

“Yes.”

“So language varies by educational level and geographical region. You can also throw in age, gender, social group, and just about every other demographic feature imaginable.”

“Language demonstrates what group you belong to.”

“You’ve got it. So the first thing I tried with your poems was linguistic demographic profiling. What does the language tell about the writer? Then I used microanalytic techniques to discern in each set of poems an individualized language pattern, what we call an idiolect. Based on all this, I was able to do the authorship analysis you requested, and answer the question: Did the same person write both sets of poetry?”

“Did she?”

“Let me go on. This analysis was especially interesting, since the K poems were composed by a French native speaker writing in English. As any foreign language teacher knows, you try to speak a second language using the linguistic system you already know, your native tongue. Until you get good, your native language bleeds through into your acquired one.”

I thought of my own use of French. “That’s why we have accents. And funny sentence structure. And word choice.”

“Exactly. For your analysis, as I worked through all the poems, when I spotted interesting passages, I put them up for split-screen comparison. On one side, I placed the poems as they are. On the other side, I altered the poems to reflect what a French speaker may have been trying to communicate in English, but failing because she was incorrectly translating from French, her first language, and using false cognates. If the overall coherence of the poem improved due to my changes, I took that as evidence the writer was perhaps Francophone. Do you want me to take you through some examples?”

“Bottom line.”

“It’s pretty obvious that both the K and Q poems were written by a native French speaker with limited formal schooling in English.”

I felt a hum of excitement.

“Next, I looked for idiosyncratic rhetorical devices common to both the K and the Q poetry, and any statistically significant skewing of vocabulary or grammar. You with me?”

“So far.”

“Listen to these lines from a K poem:

“Late in the morning I’m walking in sunshine, awake and aware like

I have not been before. A warm glow envelops me and tells all around,