Rejuvenation !

Will this attempt to rejuvenate this website work ? Well, it's worth trying, as it has lain dead or dormant for six months or so.

Sweep away the Cracks

I have a habit - a sort of irresistable temptation - of making a note of any strange uses of the English language that I encounter anywhere, in any medium.  And as I was sorting through piles of old papers earlier today, I spotted a pencil note, dated 18th June 2001 and scribbled on the corner of an old letter, that quoted a BBC report on a golfer in some tournament or other telling listeners that fortunately "any cracks in his confidence had been swept away . . . ".  I like the idea of sweeping cracks away, so let's add it to our collection of enjoyable mixed metaphors.

Sweep away the Cracks

Are you Verbally Enlightened ?

Here's another example of an editor (professional, presumably) of a weekly mag who acts a bit wild with the English language. The issue* was in mid-June this year, and his 'editorial' mentioned a meeting of the "Bilderberg Group of business and political big hitters" in Watford. Since the details of their meetings remain secret, they are "open to accusations of being part of a shadowy illuminati keen to usher in lizard-people dominance".

Now the term illuminati is a Latin word, and it is plural, and we use it to mean (whether straightforwardly or sarcastically) "those who are enlightened".  You could (grammatically) have a single illuminatus, but several together must be, plurally, illuminati.  Just as we speak and write in English of 'one man' or 'many men', but not 'a single men';  so "a shadowy illuminati" is plain wrong**.  This is another (see the previous post below) apparent instance of a writer not completely at home with the terms he is using.

But that's not all.  In his next paragraph the editor writes "Big data is controlled by several big businesses".  If he wants the term 'big data' to represent the name, whether actual or implied, of something, then it should have capital initials ('Big Data') to indicate the fact.  In which case it would be OK to write "Big Data is controlled".  But "big data" are plural.  Data is the plural of Latin datum, meaning a 'given thing', a given fact.  Data are facts supplied to enable decisions or actions to be taken.

Once again, beware of unusual or foreign words:  they can be stumbling blocks for linguistic non-illuminati.

*  In one of its standard older meanings

** Illuminatus /-i is derived from Latin lumen/-ina meaning light: so 'a shadowy illuminati' is a mix of metaphors as well as grammatically wrong. Mind you, 'shadowy illuminati' could be a deliberate wry joke; but I doubt that it is intended here.

Are you Verbally Enlightened ?

Metaphor as a Tool

Cricket writers will often, of course (pace the late Neville Cardus), be more sportsmen than fine-tuned linguists. I enjoyed a paragraph I read recently that commented on "the tail's inability to handle the tension".  Handling anything with one's tail might be awkward, though monkeys might more or less manage. Two lines later, the author wrote of their "inability to handle the pressure - they have been prickly all summer . . . they need to 'pick themselves up' and re-focus".

The team referred to could neither 'handle' 'tension' nor 'pressure'.  The term 'handle is just a metaphor: we all know what it means. But tension and pressure, even in metaphor, are abstract and opposites.  Well, who cares about mere metaphors ?  When you are so prickly you can't handle a tension, clearly what you need is to to pick yourself up (handling carefully and avoiding the prickles) and re-focus.

Another commentator wrote of Australia's "panoply of off-field disciplinary issues".  'Issue' is a very popular term at present, meaning anything from problem to complaint, from matter to argument*.  Such 'issues' have to be (metaphorically) handled, of course. But they shouldn't be grouped in 'panoplies'.  A panoply is, and always has been until now, a 'full set of military armour and weapons'**. A plumber's bag of tools might metaphorically be described as a 'panoply' (unless he has left one of them behind);  and I suppose you might metaphorically describe a skilful author's bag of tricks - with metaphor one of the set - as a panoply.

If you are an amateur writer*** with a limited vocabulary (not the full panoply, as it were), write simply, and don't try to be too clever with exotic words.  Otherwise you are very likely to put your metaphorical foot in it.

*  And of course it has other meanings, in journalism, banking and genealogy, for instance.

**  'Panoply' is composed of two elements derived from ancient Greek: pas and pan and panta are forms of the Greek  adjective meaning 'all';  hopla (singular hoplon) means weapons or implements or tools.

***  There are many who earn a living, or a part-living, from writing who are not very knowledgeable about the English language. It is a good thing that qualifications for doctors are more rigorous than those for authors.

PS   Part of the professional writer's panoply is of course the awareness of when to compromise on matters of grammar and syntax.  This is a matter of his/her personal taste. You can only break 'rules' if you know what the rules are, and why. And you should only break them deliberately, for a purpose.  But in speeech, as opposed to writing, almost anything goes so long as it works.

Translated by Machinery

Way back in 1916 the Canadian humourist Stephen Leacock inserted a little note under the title of one of his Nonsense Novels saying “Translated by machinery out of the original Russian”.

Today, almost a century later, it is really happening. But not always very succesfully. The following verses from the text of a German hymn have evidently been translated by rather primitive twentieth century machinery.  But rather moving, I think.

Rejoice in the beautiful Earth,.
because it is well worth the Freud.
O what does glories
spread over our God !

And yet it is his feet
richly decorated stools only
is only a pretty gifted,
wound erreiche creature.

Rejoice to Moon and Sun
and the stars one,.
how they change how they shine
about our Erdental.

And yet they are only creatures
from the highest God’s hand,
Hin sown on his throne
wide, shiny robe.

When at his footstool
and with the throne already such certificate,
o what must be at its heart
not be for glory and gladness.

Translated by Machinery

Words and The Week

I wouldn’t willingly give up reading The Week: it enables me to update regularly my rather flimsy view of the world and what is going on it. What is more, it is a useful source of solecisms, much quoted on this blog. But since its paragraphs and sentences are necessarily condensed from articles printed in a wide variety of newspapers and magazines, it is hard to be sure which of these solecisms derive from the original writing, and which may arise from the necessary editorial condensation. So, while it is fair to point out and to complain about some of them, it is not always clear at whose door to lay the blame.

The dreaded trove seem to appear rather frequently on this site. How about this for
extreme and unforgivable trovery ? “By setting clever computer algorithms loose on the vast trove of data, you can indentify all sorts of patterns.” This is The Week reporting an article that appeared in The New York Times: the trouble is that bad English, whether originating in Britain or the US or elsewhere, may become ‘standard’ by its very use in print. Ignorant journalists (or incompetent editors), whether working abroad or in our own country, are undoubtedly responsible for much of the corruption of our language.

Words and the Week

Vox Populi and Voces Populorum

One of my favourite reference books is Eric Partridge's Origins - a Short [ha-ha !  972 pages] Etymological Dictionary of Modern English.  It is full of surprises.  I recently looked up the word 'epic' in order to see how far backwards it can be traced, and found myself diverted to the entry 'vocation'.  The two words don't look as if they're related:  but they are.

'Epic' derives from old Greek epos meaning a word:  'vocation' comes from the Latin vox meaning a 'voice'.  Both of these are derived from an even older (prehistoric) Indo-European stem *wek-, signifying 'speech'.

Our vocal and vocation and vociferous, not to mention (which of course I now am) provoke and invoke and vocabulary and vocalist, and evoke and vouch, advocate and avow, equivocal and vowel, etc etc, are among our English words with an echo of Latin vox.  While its Greek cousin epos has bequeathed us the one word 'epic', and no more*.

*  Epithet looks as if it might be derived from Greek, and so it is: but the epi- bit has no relation to epos.  It consists of a verb element -thet- signifying 'put' with a prefix epi- signifying 'on to' - so an epithet is a word added in explanation or further definition.   In the phrases 'big cat' and 'house mouse', the adjective 'big' and the noun 'house' are both epithets;  but the term has nothing to do with epos meaning a word.

And an 'epitaph' is something inscribed 'upon a tomb (Gr taphos)'.

Vox Populi and Voces Populorum

Wille Nulle

An acquaintance of mine has the habit of using the phrase 'willy-nilly' to mean 'any old how', 'at random'.  This always disconcerts me, because the term really means 'whether you want it or not', and is derived from the outdated English will = wish or want, and its opposite 'nill', being a sort of contraction of
'not-will'.  The terms 'wille' and 'nulle', signifying 'wish' and 'wish not' may be found in Old English (the language of the Anglo-Saxons who came to Britain from the North Germany/Denmark area in the 5th century).

Actually, the explanation of the form 'willy-nilly' may be a little more complicated.  We may guess that the person who first wrote 'willy-nilly' way back in the seventeenth century was a scholar who also knew the old Latin phrase volens nolens, meaning (literally) 'willing unwilling'.

But although respectable dictionaries record our popular phrase as meaning "willing or unwilling", or "whether I want to or not", other modern ones offer the alternative meaning "at random".  This usage appears (like so many wrenchings of English terms) to have originated comparatively recently in the USA, and is obviously based on popular misunderstanding and misuse.

Unfortunately modern 'descriptive' as opposed to 'prescriptive' dictionaries appear to sanction any number of misuses of our language.  Possibly there are even some school-teachers in Britain who believe that the accurate use of words is just a pedantic fad, and (perhaps) that even grammar and spelling are matters for individuals to decide for themselves.  There are good reasons to prefer a degree of 'prescription'.  Otherwise we shall have people using words willy-nilly in the rogue sense.

Wille Nulle

Deflating the Sharp Edge of Pedantic Intolerance

I can't remember when I last moaned about confusing 'less' with 'fewer', but I have recently spotted a remark attributed to 'Ian Martin in The Guardian': "The scarier the world becomes, the more important it is to focus on the correct use of 'less' and 'fewer'.*"

I take this to be a dig at pedants rather than the earnest cry of one.  OK by me either way. 

I've also winced at the mauling of metaphors:  But I find in an article by Alastair Campbell published in Radio Times a few years ago a reference to "an inability to deal with the pressures that life was then throwing at me".  I don't believe in chucking pressures at people, any more than skating too close to the wind.

* By the way, an advert in Radio Times not long ago promoted a robot vacuum cleaner with the slogan "Less Chores, More Life".   "Less trouble" would be OK:  less is for quantity, fewer for number.  You probably wouldn't say "Fewer trouble":  and you shouldn't say "Less chores".

Deflating the Sharp Edge of Pedantic Intolerance

The Curious Incident of the Falling Leaf

It was over three years ago that a certain respectable magazine, commenting on a serious ankle injury sustained by a professional footballer in training, quoted someone as saying "it was the kind of collision that takes place hundreds of times in football without incident."

At first reading, this seems rather a strange comment.  The word 'incident' (derived from Latin elements signifying 'happening') used to be very neutral.  Basically*, Latin incidere means to 'happen' or 'befall'. Latin cadere means to fall,; and in- suggests 'onto'. I suppose even a leaf falling from a tree is strictly speaking an 'incident'.

A football collision certainly is an incident.  Today the term 'incident' is often used to imply a happening with serious implications, perhaps the result of provocation, leading to confrontation, or inviting retaliation. But not all incidents are bad: some, like unexpectedly meeting an old friend, or seeing a rainbow, are very pleasant.

* The adverb 'basically' is odd.  We might expect 'basicly',  for there is no term 'basical'.  Comically is derived from comical;  musically from musical;  pontifically from pontifical.  But then, there are no English words 'terrifical' or 'frantical', and yet we use the adverbs 'terrifically' and 'frantically'.  But even when we speak an adverb ending in '-ally', we don't pronounce the syllable 'al' at all, do we** ?  So why write it ?

** Or not usually, anyway.

The Curious Incident of the Falling Leaf

A Trinity Problem

"One in three victims of domestic abuse in Britain", The Independent is reported to have said, "are male".
Are he, then ?  This is quoted by The Week.  Which of the two publications is responsible for the solecism ?  Both, perhaps.

Maybe we could say "One third of victims of domestic abuse in Britain are male", because although the victims, of either sex, are many, the term 'a third' is actually singular ('two thirds', of course, is (or are ?) obviously plural). But it is standard English usage to treat a singular collective noun (as with Manchester United or the Margate Town Council) as representing a group of plural people. Or other, non-human, animals. So the sentence 'A flock of geese were grazing on the common', or 'A group of children were playing in the street', or 'One third of domestic cats prefer Pussipaws' is (I mean, are all) acceptable.

"The trio was in fine form, weren't they ?" a member of the audience commented at the end of the concert. And the audience all applauded, it did. See ?

A Trinity Problem

Double Vision

"In my view", said a politician on telly last month, "the situation will get worse and will deteriorate".

In fact, it will also become less satisfactory, won't get better, and offers no hope of improvement.  That just about sums it up. I hope you understand what the gentleman is getting at. Does he make himself clear, or would you like him to put it in some other way ?

Double Vision

Throughly Complex

There are always some words that one has known for years, but never uses. Two that lie unused in my lexical repertoire are the superficially similar parboil and purblind. The similarity lies in the first four letters of each: have they anything in common apart from the p-rb pattern ?

Well, yes, actually, but not at all what you might expect. The first is used today to mean ‘partly boil’, and the second ‘partly blind’. But neither the par- nor the pur- originally signified ‘partly’, but the opposite - that is, ‘fully’. Nor do those two syllables have the same origin.

In the word parboil the first syllable is derived from the Latin per-, meaning through, or thorough*. In the word purblind the first syllable is the French adjective pur-, meaning pure, whole. So the significance of both prefixes has, over centuries, been reversed; they used to indicate ‘completely’; today they indicate ‘partially’.

By the way, note that ‘through’ and ‘thorough’ are just two spellings of what is essentially the same word. “Thorough brake, thorough briar” (‘through rough undergrowth and brambles’) I seem to remember from some song - but the passage doesn’t appear, I am sorry to say, in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. In the King James Bible (Psalm 51.2) we find the prayer ‘Wash me throughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin”**.

*  Pertinacity (based on Latin per-  = thoroughly + tenere = to hold) signifies 'holding on through thick and thin'.

 **  Various towns or villages in Britain are today named Brough. The name is the equivalent of our term ‘borough’, and cognate with the familar place-name element ‘-bury’.  These words derive from ancient Germanic burg = a castle or defended site.

Throughly Complex

A Problem of Number

Number. Nothing to do with increasing loss of sensitivity, but with mixing singular with plural.

The worthy charity Shelter invites supporters to make donations, to help them help the homeless.  They tell us (and of course, we know what they mean, and they deserve all the help they can get):

"Every fifteen minutes, another family finds themselves homeless".  

It would be easy and correct to say "Every fifteen minutes another family finds itself homeless". It would also be OK to say "Every fifteen minutes another family find themselves homeless."  But the attempt at grammatical compromise "Every fifteen minutes another family finds themselves . . ." won't do, because the phrase 'finds themselves' is a mix  -   a clearly singular verb closely associated with a clearly plural pronoun.

The better sequence "another family find themselves" is rather like saying "the football team [singular] find themselves [plural] in trouble".  Here we refer to the plight of  individuals in their collective role as a group. Whether or not it's grammatically correct, let pedants debate; but it is an accepted idiomatic usage.

Note that in the second pararaph above, I referred to the charity [singular] as 'they' and 'them' [plural].  Were you irritated by the grammatical anomaly ?  Most likely, you never even noticed it.

Meanwhile, support Shelter.

A Problem of Number

Lost and Found

A favourite author of mine is Agatha Christie; but like all writers, she is capable of an occasional solecism (more about that word another time).

She writes in her autobiography "One day Wilfred rang up from Portsmouth and said that a wonderful chance had come his way.  There was a party being assembled to look for treasure trove in South America".

Now there's no point in "looking for treasure trove" because by definition it doesn't need looking for: it is already found.  The French word 'trouvé' (the origin of the term 'trove') means 'found', and the legal context of the term 'treasure trove' is the need to decide to whom such 'found' treasure belongs.

Worse - far worse - than Christie's misunderstanding of the phrase is the one I came across recently: "a trove of treasure".  This makes 'trove' into a noun.  You might just as well (or as badly) write of  'a found' of treasure.

Many solecisms are caused by people using terms they don't understand.  The safest thing is to avoid using strange words at all.  If you want to learn what they really mean, use a dictionary.  But beware: recent dictionaries have become descriptive rather than prescriptive, and even include some misuses of words - presumably because we are almost as likely to hear misuses as to hear words used correctly !

Lost and Found

The Case of the Two (or Three) Cases

It is easy to confuse the term ‘case’ with the term ‘case’. Admittedly, they appear to be somewhat similar; but in fact they are quite distinct.

“That is not the case” says the person offered the wrong baggage from a left luggage counter.

“That is not the case” says the lawyer for the defence. Or "The case was tried at the Old Bailey", the newspaper reports.

Case A is derived from the Old French casse, itself derived from Latin capsa meaning a container, and origin of our term capsule. Modern French says caisse, modern Italian says cassa. The Ancient Roman original was related to the Latin verb capio/capt- meaning to take (hence also our words capture and chase) or hold.

Case B comes from Latin casus (literally, a ‘falling’, from the Latin verb cado/cas- meaning to fall and to happen*.) The Latin noun occasio meant a happening: hence our word ‘occasion’. So our idiom “That is not the case” means “That is not how it actually happened*”. In the legal context, a ‘case’ implies a set of actual facts to be determined:  or the truth that has to be reached in order that a judgement may be made.

* Compare our English phrase ‘to befall’.

** “That is not the case” is really a rather pompous way of saying “Not so”.

The Case of the Two Cases

The Problem of Transpiration

I have recently read an interesting book, which loooks convincingly scholarly, though I know that some scholars dispute some of its contents. It is titled The Jesus Dynasty, and is written by Professor James D. Tabor. However it is not the subject matter that this blog is concerned with, but Tabor's misuse (several times in his book) of the term 'transpire'. 'Transpire' is built from two Latin elements: trans, meaning 'across' (as in trans-atlantic); and spirare meaning to breathe (animals, including man) or to blow (the wind, literally or metaphorically). Our words spirit and spiritual and inspire derive from the same source.

Transpire thus means 'to breathe' across, or to 'seep through'.  Breath is (or was) thought to be non-material, 'spiritual'.  So the term 'transpire' has been used metaphorically to describe information 'leaked', as it were, probably unintentionally, possibly over a long period.*

Using - or rather misusing - the word as a synonym for 'occur' or 'happen' is plain wrong, and was first recorded from USA in the mid-nineteenth century. And the misuse (some journalist, perhaps, or politician may have used it because it he thought it sounded posh even though he didn't know what it really meant), and it has since become acceptable in USA, where Tabor works and teaches.  [I have just spotted even worse transpirations in Tabor's book: look at this: "There are records of what was transpiring in those areas of Christianity to the West that had been influenced by Paul - but details of what transpired among those who had followed the Teaching represented by the Jesus dynasty were not preserved".]

But I also recently reread Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians, and was delighted to see how appropriately he uses the term:  ". . . although the details of the conversation [between General Gordon and Lord Wolseley] have never transpired, it is known that . . ."   this is intended to refer to the possibility of a slow leak of information over a period of time - a transpiration that, to Strachey's regret, never happened - or, as North Americans might prefer to say, never transpired.

     *    It is a reference not to a happening itself, but to the knowledge of the happening.

The Problem of Transpiration

Receive the Prince in the Hall and Chase the Occupants into the Cellar

What a wonderfully strange thing language is !  Every word that we utter has its own ancestry, its own story; and what extraordinary stories these can be !

One of the many books on language on my shelves is Eric Partridge's Origins - a weighty volume in spite of the modest subtitle that its author gives it:  A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English.

Partridge arranges this dictionary alphabetically by 'word elements', so when you look up (say) 'origin', it instructs you 'See orient'.    Well, you can understand, even if you don't quite know what the relationship is, that there might be a connection between these two words starting with 'ori-' .  But what is it ?  So we look up orient and find that both orient and origin come from a Latin verb oriri, meaning to 'arise'.  We get the point - the origin of things is 'how they arise';  and the orient means the East because that's where the sun 'arises'.

But I have just found an old envelope with some scribbled pencil notes of mine that remind me how unexpected some of these word origins are.  You look up occult in Partridge's book, and you are told to 'See hall'.  What on earth can be the connection ?  It turns out that the word hall is derived from Indo-European khal, khel, khol or khul, denoting a small space or hut in which you might hide things; from which our language (via the Anglo-Saxons) got the word cellar (where you hide the drink, perhaps); and the terms cell and hall.  From the same Indo-European terms came Latin and Greek verbs implying 'hiding':  Latin celare and Greek kaluptein.  And the second syllable of our E word occult is derived from the same source.  So our words cellar, hall, hell and occult all share the same origins (not to mention hulk, conceal and cellulose, apocalypse and - perhaps, says Partridge - calypso).

Now let's look up occupant.  "See capability" says Partridge.  I'll leave you to work that out for yourself. Useful hint: these two words are related to receive, prince and chase. I bet you're more baffled than ever now.

Receive the Prince in the Hall and Chase the Occupants into the Cellar

A Little Too Mainstreamish

I've been collecting noun-adjectives for a long time:  nouns like 'key' or 'mammoth' or 'routine' that are popularly used as adjectives. A key decision,  a mammoth jumble sale, a routine inspection.  The problem (or the joke) occurs when the noun-adjectives are then qualified with adverbs; 'very key' or 'overly mammoth'; or, as heard on TV not long ago, "bad weather seems to be becoming more routine". So I was surprised and delighted to find in the Radio Times recently a brief article that described camel-racing with robot jockeys (yes, that's right) in Arabia as "actually a very mainstream sport".

What surprises me even more is that the two-volume Shorter Oxford Dictionary (2007 edition) does not include the term 'mainstream' at all - not even as a noun.  Nor do various other dictionaries I have looked into: with the exception of the BBC  English Dictionary of 1993.  It gives as one example the noun phrase 'mainstream education'.  That doesn't imply that the word mainstream is here intended as an adjective:  it is a quite respectable 'noun in apposition' (compare 'football stadium'; 'book cover'; 'carriage way';  'twentieth century prime minister'; 'tooth decay'; 'garden gnome').  It is only when we find a writer adding a qualifying adverb like 'particularly' or 'genuinely' or 'utterly' or 'very' or 'more' to one of these 'nouns in apposition' that he or she reveals a lack of feeling for the functions of words.  Or 'word insensitivity' if we want to be appositional.

A Little Too Mainstreamish