When my brother and I were respectively about eleven and twelve years old, we sometimes used to stay with an aunt and uncle in Herefordshire. Their own two boys were a few years younger than us, and had some interesting words in their vocabulary that amused us (more sophisticated) young men a lot.
Our favourites were (the spelling is of course mine) 'bubbly' and 'hink'. Both terms cropped up quite a lot in ordinary conversation, and very occasionally were used together as a phrase 'bubbly hink'.
"Are we going out anywhere this afternoon ?" we might enquire. And they would reply "We're all going to see friends at Marlwood, bubbly, hink."
Whether my brother and I were able to spell it, at least we knew that bubbly meant 'probably', and realised that hink must mean 'I think'. The terms entered our own private vocabulary, rather as one consciously uses foreign words, and were never forgotten.
But don't we all, even correct spellers, mangle words when we speak them ? Do you never say 'probbly', or 'praps' ? Do you always pronounce 'actually' as a four-syllable word, and never shorten it to 'atcherly' . Bubbly you do, hink.
Which leads me to comment on the late Bernard Shaw's pottiest notion that it might be possible to modify English spelling so that it was entirely phonetic. You can see what he meant: why not write 'ment' instead of 'meant ' ? Or rite instead of write or right ? Or thort instead of thought ? But our English language, even now after eighty years of radio and sixty of television (theez figgers are not ment to be prisice) we don't all pronounce words the same. In East Anglia where I live, 'boat' is often pronounced 'boot'. My wife, brought up in Lancashire, says glass (to ryme, or rime, with lass) rather than glarce. Our American cousins say dants for dance. Scots say 'worrld' where southerners say 'werld'. Few of us now pronounce the 'h' in 'where' or 'when', but say 'wear' and 'wen'. Did Shaw imagine that the public could be educated to change their pronunciation to match his new spelling ?
Shaw should have known (or shud uv noan) that pronunciations have been constantly evolving since the first (Anglo-Saxon) English was spoken. Who, at any stage in its evolution, had the authority to insist that any particular version of any particular word was right, and others wrong ?
It took some centuries of print before any notion of 'correct spelling' was generally adopted, and that only because it is easier to read familiar sequences of letters than to have the extra trouble of interpreting all sorts of variations. Correct spelling is only a convention that helps us to read*. To seek a similar universal convention for pronunciation would be asking too much - it just wouldn't happen. And to seek to train everyone to write words as he or she says them would cause more problems than it would solve.
It is a pity, perhaps (praps), that American and English spellings have been allowed to diverge. Flavors and flavours are both acceptable spellings, and it would bubbly be no bad thing if all English-speakers would agree to a single convention in the matter. It should not, hink, be a matter of national pride.
*Atcherly, it also helps us pedants to work out what the origins of most of our words are; but we must admit that we are only a very tiny minority, and most folks couldn't care less. Of course, we would say they don't know what fun they are missing.
Bubbly hink
Showing posts with label English language. Show all posts
Showing posts with label English language. Show all posts
Friday, 24 September 2010
Saturday, 10 July 2010
As much as we don't understand
It's Radio Times again. One can understand that the Editor might want to commission articles from people with useful things to say even though their command of the English language may be dodgy, but we would assume that one of the roles of an editor is tactfully to eliminate solecisms or mixed-up grammar from their contributions.
"As much as you feel that H------ isn't entirely at ease under the scrutiny that her job entails, there's equally a sense that she's forged her sense of self under such duress."
This falsely conceived 'as-much-as' construction has shoved its clumsy way into all sorts of journalism in recent years, causing severe collateral damage. Grammar and syntax, coherence and logic become infected.
The falsity consists in confusion between two standard idioms.
The sequence 'as . . . . as' was formerly used to indicate simile: 'as thin as a rake', 'as bold as brass'. So we may use the phrase, 'as much as' to indicate similarity (or identity) of quantity: 'as much as the tank will hold', or 'as much as you can eat at a sitting'. These phrases are closely akin to 'as many as' ('as many as you have room for', or 'as many as you like').
But that idiom is quite different from the "Much as I respect your knowledge, I can't say I agree with your opinions" kind of construction, which implies not similarity or identity, but contrast. Here we are saying "Although I respect, yet I disagree"; or "I do respect, but I disagree".
The passage I have quoted above from RT is garbled. The writer appears at first to imply both ideas at once, both similarity and contrast. The unexpected additional adverb 'equally' seems intended to stress similarity or identity. But if we read the sentence through and think carefully, we can see that 'equality' is not what the writer means to express so much as 'simultaneity'.
OK, we can more or less see what the writer means, but we understand in spite of what he or she has actually written. The writer's point would have been clearer if the 'As much as' phrase had been abandoned and replaced by the single word 'If '.
As much as we don't understand
"As much as you feel that H------ isn't entirely at ease under the scrutiny that her job entails, there's equally a sense that she's forged her sense of self under such duress."
This falsely conceived 'as-much-as' construction has shoved its clumsy way into all sorts of journalism in recent years, causing severe collateral damage. Grammar and syntax, coherence and logic become infected.
The falsity consists in confusion between two standard idioms.
The sequence 'as . . . . as' was formerly used to indicate simile: 'as thin as a rake', 'as bold as brass'. So we may use the phrase, 'as much as' to indicate similarity (or identity) of quantity: 'as much as the tank will hold', or 'as much as you can eat at a sitting'. These phrases are closely akin to 'as many as' ('as many as you have room for', or 'as many as you like').
But that idiom is quite different from the "Much as I respect your knowledge, I can't say I agree with your opinions" kind of construction, which implies not similarity or identity, but contrast. Here we are saying "Although I respect, yet I disagree"; or "I do respect, but I disagree".
The passage I have quoted above from RT is garbled. The writer appears at first to imply both ideas at once, both similarity and contrast. The unexpected additional adverb 'equally' seems intended to stress similarity or identity. But if we read the sentence through and think carefully, we can see that 'equality' is not what the writer means to express so much as 'simultaneity'.
OK, we can more or less see what the writer means, but we understand in spite of what he or she has actually written. The writer's point would have been clearer if the 'As much as' phrase had been abandoned and replaced by the single word 'If '.
As much as we don't understand
Sunday, 2 May 2010
Studying Human Language
I have been reading Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct. It is an interesting and well-written book; and by 'well-written' I mean more than just 'grammatically and syntactically correct': the author, a Canadian, is an internationally celebrated expert in the Chomsky tradition, but carries his learning lightly. His style is lively and (insofar as the subject permits !) clear, with a happy knack of occasional and never inappropriate 'lapses' into popular usage.
It is sometimes unnerving for an English Englishman to read a North American's asessment of 'The English Language': the English of the UK, however much it may betray the influence of the USA, nevertheless has its own particular characteristics. Personally, I would like to believe - though I mustn't - that the English spoken in the British Isles is 'standard', and that other versions of it are mere aberrant dialects. No doubt every English-speaking nation tends to regard its own version of the language as standard, and it must be hard to write a book that includes a number of examples of usage without regarding one's own dialect as the normal one. So a UK Englishman needs to accept Pinker's book with due humility.
The only part of the book that annoyed me was Pinker's uncharacteristic dismissal of those who are chiefly interested in the evolution of the English language and its history and variations, the differences between the 'dialects' of the various segments of society, and the quite real dilemmas of literacy and 'correctness'. Yes, we know (or should know) that our language is constantly evolving, and that such an evolution may be driven by cultural differences at all sorts of levels: but it is a little unseemly for a scholar in one particular aspect of language study to dismiss as 'mavens'* (a term that Pinker uses pejoratively with unexpected bitterness) those whose interest, whether as professional writers, critics or speakers, is mainly focussed on another.
* My Dictionary of Slang tells me that 'maven' is American slang (of Hebrew origin) for one who regards him- (or her) self as having insider knowledge. Maven yourself, Pinker ! But I learnt a lot from your book, just the same.
Studying Human Language
It is sometimes unnerving for an English Englishman to read a North American's asessment of 'The English Language': the English of the UK, however much it may betray the influence of the USA, nevertheless has its own particular characteristics. Personally, I would like to believe - though I mustn't - that the English spoken in the British Isles is 'standard', and that other versions of it are mere aberrant dialects. No doubt every English-speaking nation tends to regard its own version of the language as standard, and it must be hard to write a book that includes a number of examples of usage without regarding one's own dialect as the normal one. So a UK Englishman needs to accept Pinker's book with due humility.
The only part of the book that annoyed me was Pinker's uncharacteristic dismissal of those who are chiefly interested in the evolution of the English language and its history and variations, the differences between the 'dialects' of the various segments of society, and the quite real dilemmas of literacy and 'correctness'. Yes, we know (or should know) that our language is constantly evolving, and that such an evolution may be driven by cultural differences at all sorts of levels: but it is a little unseemly for a scholar in one particular aspect of language study to dismiss as 'mavens'* (a term that Pinker uses pejoratively with unexpected bitterness) those whose interest, whether as professional writers, critics or speakers, is mainly focussed on another.
* My Dictionary of Slang tells me that 'maven' is American slang (of Hebrew origin) for one who regards him- (or her) self as having insider knowledge. Maven yourself, Pinker ! But I learnt a lot from your book, just the same.
Studying Human Language
Wednesday, 17 March 2010
The Latter of Three
"I had perhaps been the only American teenager", writes an author in an article reprinted in The Week, " . . . to have graduated from high schoool without reading The Catcher in the Rye, though it had sat on my parents' bookshelf, right next to Franny and Zooey and Raise the High the Roof Beam, Carpenters . Once 0r twice, on rainy afternoons, I'd skimmed the first pages of the latter books and found the writing overly cute, the subject matter tired."
We Brits must not sneer at the north American 'overly', though it may not be in our twenty-first century vocabulary. But 'nearly' is, and has the same construction, and I am not aware that any pedant has complained about it. The truth is that 'overly' was in our language centuries before 'nearly': it's just that it has gone out of fashion this side of the Atlantic, but the Yanks have preserved it.
But we can't so easily excuse the 'latter' of three books. The best I can do for the defence is to insist that Franny and Zooey and Raise the High Roof Beam are to be seen as a single pair, as one unit , perhaps in this instance even bound together in one volume, and thus quite reasonably contrasted syntactically with the other unit consisting solely of The Catcher in the Rye.
No. I don't believe my case would stand up in the Court of Pedantry.
The Latter of Three
We Brits must not sneer at the north American 'overly', though it may not be in our twenty-first century vocabulary. But 'nearly' is, and has the same construction, and I am not aware that any pedant has complained about it. The truth is that 'overly' was in our language centuries before 'nearly': it's just that it has gone out of fashion this side of the Atlantic, but the Yanks have preserved it.
But we can't so easily excuse the 'latter' of three books. The best I can do for the defence is to insist that Franny and Zooey and Raise the High Roof Beam are to be seen as a single pair, as one unit , perhaps in this instance even bound together in one volume, and thus quite reasonably contrasted syntactically with the other unit consisting solely of The Catcher in the Rye.
No. I don't believe my case would stand up in the Court of Pedantry.
The Latter of Three
Wednesday, 3 March 2010
The Trove that the Founding Fathers Hid
Oh dear, another trove (which is not a noun but an adjectival past participle of the French verb 'trouver', meaning to 'find') has reared its head. This 'trove' appears in an editorial paragraph about a film , National Treasure, in Radio Times, in which (so illiterate editorial staff tell us) a "family has been charged with protecting a treasure trove hidden by the Founding Fathers of America". So the 'trove' has been 'hidden', has it ? That's back to front: 'treasure trove' is treasure that was once hidden, but now has been found. Remove the rogue term 'trove', and the editorial sentence makes perfect sense.
The Trove that the Founding Fathers Hid
The Trove that the Founding Fathers Hid
Thursday, 11 February 2010
Highly occupational
"In our world, the moving picture world", said film director Jason Judd in Agatha Christie's The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side, "marriage is a fully occupational hazard".
All right, just as hitting a finger with a hammer is a hazard faced by a carpenter, or a crash into the straw bales or the wall of tyres is a hazard to a racing driver, so marriage could be said cynically to be a hazard among film stars.
Now a hit on the thumb may be a less fearsome risk than crashing a racing car; so you could perhaps say that the carpenter's hazard is 'less severe' than that of the racing driver. But can you say that the hazard of the carpenter is only 'slightly occupational', while the racing driver's hazard - or even the film star's hazard - is somehow 'fully occupational' ?
No. You can have degrees of severity, but not degrees of occupationality (if there is such a word*).
We shouldn't blame Dame Agatha for that, though. The solecism is in the mouth of one of her characters, and 'fully occupational' may be the very thing a bloke like him would have said.
On the other hand, the dozen or so instances in the same book of the phrase 'St John's Ambulance' occur mainly in Christie's paragraphs of narrative - and we all know that's wrong, don't we ?**
* There is now: I've just used it.
** The correct title is St John Ambulance.
Highly occupational
All right, just as hitting a finger with a hammer is a hazard faced by a carpenter, or a crash into the straw bales or the wall of tyres is a hazard to a racing driver, so marriage could be said cynically to be a hazard among film stars.
Now a hit on the thumb may be a less fearsome risk than crashing a racing car; so you could perhaps say that the carpenter's hazard is 'less severe' than that of the racing driver. But can you say that the hazard of the carpenter is only 'slightly occupational', while the racing driver's hazard - or even the film star's hazard - is somehow 'fully occupational' ?
No. You can have degrees of severity, but not degrees of occupationality (if there is such a word*).
We shouldn't blame Dame Agatha for that, though. The solecism is in the mouth of one of her characters, and 'fully occupational' may be the very thing a bloke like him would have said.
On the other hand, the dozen or so instances in the same book of the phrase 'St John's Ambulance' occur mainly in Christie's paragraphs of narrative - and we all know that's wrong, don't we ?**
* There is now: I've just used it.
** The correct title is St John Ambulance.
Highly occupational
Saturday, 6 February 2010
Awkward by name and nature
As I put a title to the previous item, I was struck (as who would not be ?) by the thought that the word 'awkward' might be the only one in our language with the sequence 'wkw' in it.
And what does the word really mean ? We are used to forward, backward, upward, downward, onward and homeward (like the ploughman's weary way - see Gray's Elegy etc). These are all adverbs, but awkward appears to be an adjective.
But awkward was itself once an adverb, and the 'awk' part meant 'askew' or 'out of true'. So it meant 'wonkywise'. The first syllable derives, so the experts tell us, from Icelandic 'ofugr', which became in Middle English 'awk', signifying 'contrary' or plain 'wrong'. Contrariwise, as Lewis Carroll's Tweedledee used to say.
I suppose 'awk' was the nearest our English ancestors could get to pronouncing 'ofgur'. Who can blame them ?
Awkward by name and nature
And what does the word really mean ? We are used to forward, backward, upward, downward, onward and homeward (like the ploughman's weary way - see Gray's Elegy etc). These are all adverbs, but awkward appears to be an adjective.
But awkward was itself once an adverb, and the 'awk' part meant 'askew' or 'out of true'. So it meant 'wonkywise'. The first syllable derives, so the experts tell us, from Icelandic 'ofugr', which became in Middle English 'awk', signifying 'contrary' or plain 'wrong'. Contrariwise, as Lewis Carroll's Tweedledee used to say.
I suppose 'awk' was the nearest our English ancestors could get to pronouncing 'ofgur'. Who can blame them ?
Awkward by name and nature
These awkward cliches and metaphors again
"Gregory's Girl was literally* filmed on a shoe string", we were recently told on TV. Is this a new technique that replaces film or video - and how much footage (that seems an appropriate term) can one record on a twenty-five centimetre shoe-string ? Perhaps the statement referred not to medium but to location: but that would require an enormous, specially commissioned, shoe string. Would it really have been worth while, even as a publicity stunt ? It's all a bit of a mystery.
A politician insisted the other day, in regard to one or other of the serious messes in which government and public services find themselves these days, that what was needed now were "clear and transparent benchmarks". Benchmarks should be clear, certainly; but I would have thought that to provide transparent ones would be rather counter-productive. Or was it at the back of the speaker's mind that politicians and public servants might feel safer if perhaps the benchmarks were virtually invisible ?
* See also post of 25th November below.
These awkward cliches and metaphors again
A politician insisted the other day, in regard to one or other of the serious messes in which government and public services find themselves these days, that what was needed now were "clear and transparent benchmarks". Benchmarks should be clear, certainly; but I would have thought that to provide transparent ones would be rather counter-productive. Or was it at the back of the speaker's mind that politicians and public servants might feel safer if perhaps the benchmarks were virtually invisible ?
* See also post of 25th November below.
These awkward cliches and metaphors again
Wednesday, 9 December 2009
Sectioned and Classified
One category of new words - or of new usages of old words, actually - is professional jargon that gradually becomes absorbed into general use. Two examples of this cropped up recently, and I wondered how many readers or hearers would be aware of the significance, or even just the meaning, of the terms.
The first was a reference to the possibility that a certain person might be 'sectioned'. We all know the noun 'section'; it means a bit, a slice, a portion of something, doesn't it ? Oh yes, and it can mean part of a book or a written article or an Act of Parliament. Or even, in the USA (so my old Shorter Oxford English Dictonary tells me), 'a portion of a sleeping car containing two berths'. But its use as a verb - to 'section' someone - does not appear in that 50-year-old edition. But the 2007 edition of the SOED tells us that 'to section' may mean 'to cause a person to be compulsorily detained in a psychiatric hospital in accordance with the relevant section of the Mental Health Act'.
We might guess that some 70 per cent of the English-speaking world will have no idea of this use of the term, and that of the remainder, 20 per cent might know roughly what it signifies, while only 9 per cent will know just why the word 'section' is used. This leaves space for a hypothetical 1 per cent who know that the Mental Health Act concerned is that enacted by parliament in 1983, superseding that of 1959. (I can't claim to have been one of this 1 per cent until this afternoon). This use of 'to section' will have been coined by doctors, psychiatrists, nurses and lawyers: the general public just has to catch up on it.
Similarly, we were shown on our local TV news programme a couple of days ago some of the large collection of aerial photographs of the awful inundation of the sea over the East Anglian coast in 1953. The pictures had not been made public before, said the presenter, since some of them had been 'classified'. No explanation of this usage was offered. To classify something is essentialy 'to assign it to a particular class', just as Peking Man and the Neanderthals are, together with us, classified as hominids. But just because certain documents were, during the second world war, 'classified' by government officials as secret, the rest of us have ever since had to work out the significance of the jargon (imported from USA) for ourselves. Not that this is necessarily an offence against the English language: but it illustrates how specialist terminology (a polite way of saying 'jargon') tends to be off-loaded on to us commoners without our really knowing what it's all about.
Sectioned and Classified
The first was a reference to the possibility that a certain person might be 'sectioned'. We all know the noun 'section'; it means a bit, a slice, a portion of something, doesn't it ? Oh yes, and it can mean part of a book or a written article or an Act of Parliament. Or even, in the USA (so my old Shorter Oxford English Dictonary tells me), 'a portion of a sleeping car containing two berths'. But its use as a verb - to 'section' someone - does not appear in that 50-year-old edition. But the 2007 edition of the SOED tells us that 'to section' may mean 'to cause a person to be compulsorily detained in a psychiatric hospital in accordance with the relevant section of the Mental Health Act'.
We might guess that some 70 per cent of the English-speaking world will have no idea of this use of the term, and that of the remainder, 20 per cent might know roughly what it signifies, while only 9 per cent will know just why the word 'section' is used. This leaves space for a hypothetical 1 per cent who know that the Mental Health Act concerned is that enacted by parliament in 1983, superseding that of 1959. (I can't claim to have been one of this 1 per cent until this afternoon). This use of 'to section' will have been coined by doctors, psychiatrists, nurses and lawyers: the general public just has to catch up on it.
Similarly, we were shown on our local TV news programme a couple of days ago some of the large collection of aerial photographs of the awful inundation of the sea over the East Anglian coast in 1953. The pictures had not been made public before, said the presenter, since some of them had been 'classified'. No explanation of this usage was offered. To classify something is essentialy 'to assign it to a particular class', just as Peking Man and the Neanderthals are, together with us, classified as hominids. But just because certain documents were, during the second world war, 'classified' by government officials as secret, the rest of us have ever since had to work out the significance of the jargon (imported from USA) for ourselves. Not that this is necessarily an offence against the English language: but it illustrates how specialist terminology (a polite way of saying 'jargon') tends to be off-loaded on to us commoners without our really knowing what it's all about.
Sectioned and Classified
Wednesday, 25 November 2009
It's Literally Metaphorical
It seems very innocent, perhaps, at first reading, this sentence that opens a brief paragraph in a recent edition of The Week about how Bob Hoskins got into acting: "Bob Hoskins fell into acting literally by accident."
Aha ! cries the reader, this should be fun. Did he stumble on the steps of a theatre and had to be helped in limping, only to find himself on stage in the middle of a piece by Chekhov ? The combination of the words 'fell', 'accident' and 'literally' seem to imply something of that kind.
But it turns out that he didn't literally fall, and the accident was not as dramatic as the term usually implies. The 'accident' was just a misunderstanding - he found himself taking part in an audition that he had not meant to attend - and got the part.
Here we are with yet another case of the misused 'literally': "He literally swept her off her feet"; "I was literally boiling with anger".
But wait: the very term 'accident' has a history. It was not coined to describe disasters - rail crashes or broken windows or fractured pelvises. It is based on the metaphorical* use of a Latin verb cado meaning (literally !) to fall. The word accident, as used in our language for centuries, meant not a literal, physical, damaging event, but a metaphorical 'befalling' - a chance encounter, an unforeseen contingency, a coincidence.
So Hoskins's entry into the acting profession was a fall and an accident only in this metaphorical sense of a happening, something (a misunderstanding at an audition, actually) that 'befell'. It was not a 'literal' accident at all, but a metaphorical one, whether in its original sense or its modern one.
"Shut up, you miserable old pedant!", readers may well exclaim; "What you say may well be true, but who cares ?"
"No need to get nasty about it", the pedant replies. "No offence is meant. Beneficent pedantry is not so much complaining as explaining.*
* You'd think these two words would have a similar derivation: but actually they don't. 'Complain' derives from Latin plangere = to bewail; while 'explain' derives from Latin planus = flat or level.
It's Literally Metaphorical
Aha ! cries the reader, this should be fun. Did he stumble on the steps of a theatre and had to be helped in limping, only to find himself on stage in the middle of a piece by Chekhov ? The combination of the words 'fell', 'accident' and 'literally' seem to imply something of that kind.
But it turns out that he didn't literally fall, and the accident was not as dramatic as the term usually implies. The 'accident' was just a misunderstanding - he found himself taking part in an audition that he had not meant to attend - and got the part.
Here we are with yet another case of the misused 'literally': "He literally swept her off her feet"; "I was literally boiling with anger".
But wait: the very term 'accident' has a history. It was not coined to describe disasters - rail crashes or broken windows or fractured pelvises. It is based on the metaphorical* use of a Latin verb cado meaning (literally !) to fall. The word accident, as used in our language for centuries, meant not a literal, physical, damaging event, but a metaphorical 'befalling' - a chance encounter, an unforeseen contingency, a coincidence.
So Hoskins's entry into the acting profession was a fall and an accident only in this metaphorical sense of a happening, something (a misunderstanding at an audition, actually) that 'befell'. It was not a 'literal' accident at all, but a metaphorical one, whether in its original sense or its modern one.
"Shut up, you miserable old pedant!", readers may well exclaim; "What you say may well be true, but who cares ?"
"No need to get nasty about it", the pedant replies. "No offence is meant. Beneficent pedantry is not so much complaining as explaining.*
* You'd think these two words would have a similar derivation: but actually they don't. 'Complain' derives from Latin plangere = to bewail; while 'explain' derives from Latin planus = flat or level.
It's Literally Metaphorical
Thursday, 29 October 2009
It's How You Say It
Argumentum ad hominem (literally 'argument addressed to [the] man') is a Latin term describing how, if you want to win round a person to your point of view, you 'spin' the argument to match that person's situation and personality and sensitivities. Which is the principle employed by any subtle advertiser.
I like Dorling-Kindersley books - who doesn't ? But the crafty wording of their blurb about a book on home computing irritates me.
"Dorling-Kindersley, renowned for its digital expertise", they proclaim, "shares its know-how in a series of user-friendly visual guides to all the computer skills you'll ever need."
Cleverly put, but not quite accurate. D-K is renowned not for digital expertise, but for producing well-designed and informative books. The subjects are so varied that within the firm as a whole, even if you include everyone from senior management to the editiorial and design departments to office clerks, there cannot possibly be an expert on every subject their books treat, from Music to Wildlife to History to Computing. For expertise they will hire specialists in each field. They won't have it all 'in house'.
The polysyllabic authority of the phrase 'digital expertise' is softened by the deliberate casualness of the phrases 'know-how' (pop-speak) and 'user-friendly' (marketing jargon). "We at D-K", they seem to be telling us, "are academically superb but oh-so-human and not a bit uppity". The term "visual" gives encouragement to customers - uneducated as they must be, or presumably they wouldn't need our books - who may feel a little inhibited at the prospect of coping with technical jargon, while "guide" has friendly and re-assuring overtones. And we at D-K know your ambitions are pretty modest: our publication will help you achieve "all the skills [that a mug like] you'll ever need" - note the informality that the apostrophe in "you'll" implies. We can almost visualise the advertising copywriter's patronising smile (not that he is likely to be a 'digital expert' himself).
Actually, it is the phrase 'digital expertise' that the pedant will most dislike. 'Digital' (from Latin digitus = finger) means (a) 'to do with the fingers'; and (b) (because people used to count on their fingers, of which we conveniently have ten) 'to do with numbers or numerals'.
'Digital expertise' therefore implies (or should imply) either manual or mathematical skill. But because the basis of electronic computing is the translation of data into series of rapid pulses or digits (1 and 0 in the 'binary' system), the word 'digital' has gained an extra significance. But you can't properly speak of 'digital expertise' until the adjective 'digital' has been accepted as a term to describe 'operating a computer', which I hope it hasn't yet*.
* Once 'digital' is given this extra meaning, we shall be able to say that entering your domestic accounts on a computer is a test of 'digital expertise' in three different senses at once.
It's How You Say It
I like Dorling-Kindersley books - who doesn't ? But the crafty wording of their blurb about a book on home computing irritates me.
"Dorling-Kindersley, renowned for its digital expertise", they proclaim, "shares its know-how in a series of user-friendly visual guides to all the computer skills you'll ever need."
Cleverly put, but not quite accurate. D-K is renowned not for digital expertise, but for producing well-designed and informative books. The subjects are so varied that within the firm as a whole, even if you include everyone from senior management to the editiorial and design departments to office clerks, there cannot possibly be an expert on every subject their books treat, from Music to Wildlife to History to Computing. For expertise they will hire specialists in each field. They won't have it all 'in house'.
The polysyllabic authority of the phrase 'digital expertise' is softened by the deliberate casualness of the phrases 'know-how' (pop-speak) and 'user-friendly' (marketing jargon). "We at D-K", they seem to be telling us, "are academically superb but oh-so-human and not a bit uppity". The term "visual" gives encouragement to customers - uneducated as they must be, or presumably they wouldn't need our books - who may feel a little inhibited at the prospect of coping with technical jargon, while "guide" has friendly and re-assuring overtones. And we at D-K know your ambitions are pretty modest: our publication will help you achieve "all the skills [that a mug like] you'll ever need" - note the informality that the apostrophe in "you'll" implies. We can almost visualise the advertising copywriter's patronising smile (not that he is likely to be a 'digital expert' himself).
Actually, it is the phrase 'digital expertise' that the pedant will most dislike. 'Digital' (from Latin digitus = finger) means (a) 'to do with the fingers'; and (b) (because people used to count on their fingers, of which we conveniently have ten) 'to do with numbers or numerals'.
'Digital expertise' therefore implies (or should imply) either manual or mathematical skill. But because the basis of electronic computing is the translation of data into series of rapid pulses or digits (1 and 0 in the 'binary' system), the word 'digital' has gained an extra significance. But you can't properly speak of 'digital expertise' until the adjective 'digital' has been accepted as a term to describe 'operating a computer', which I hope it hasn't yet*.
* Once 'digital' is given this extra meaning, we shall be able to say that entering your domestic accounts on a computer is a test of 'digital expertise' in three different senses at once.
It's How You Say It
Saturday, 24 October 2009
My Dear, I Feel Totally Decimated
For years I had always assumed that Clive James was little more than a witty and amusing TV entertainer - which shows how foolish it can be to make assumptions. Then, a few months ago, I read his autobiographical Unreliable Memoirs (pretty frivolous), and Falling Towards England and North Face of Soho (a little more serious), which gave hints of greater depths; and more recently At the Pillars of Hercules, where James displays his alter ego, the erudite (but always readable) literary critic. Now I am half way through another of his books of criticism, The Meaning of Recognition - a title which seems a bit pretentious until we find that Clive J is pulling our legs, for in this, the title also of the first chapter of the book, the 'recognition' is not some abstract philosophical concept but the phenomenon of being physically recognisable due to exposure on the TV screen. (Another chapter, 'Great Sopranos of Our Time' turns out not to be what its title seems to suggest, but is about the TV 'Sopranos' gangster series compared with the Godfather films.)
What resonates with the pedant in me is James's lament at the deterioration of the English language in the media. "Among ordinary pens for hire", he writes, "it is no longer common to write without solecisms; even those who can are likely to bolt phrases together with no real attention to their derivation, and in too many cases their language is utterly emptied of the history that brought it into being".
I am afraid that this situation is largely due to the influence of Television, the medium through which James won his fame. Over and over again we hear presenters and news-readers and interviewed experts mangling the language, or adopting (presumably in order to be accepted as 'ordinary people') modern linguistic quirks, kerb-side idioms and popular cliches; all of which, if we stop to think about it, we can see do nothing to make their statements or opinions clearer or more authoritative: it merely makes the speakers seem superficially more 'ordinary' - so keen is their desire for 'street cred'. James himself is not above doing this sometimes - but it is always 'occasional' and in the appropriate place, somehow genuinely enlivening his prose without demeaning it. It takes a master of English language and literature to do this without vulgarity or bathos.
It was a genuine wildlife expert, I am sure, who told us recently on screen that the arrival in our country of the north American grey squirrel had 'completely decimated' the native red squirrel. Originally the term 'decimated' had the special meaning of 'eliminating one tenth' (thus leaving ninety per cent alive and kicking)*. Of course the word could be used metaphorically with less mathematical precision, to imply severely reducing a population. But phrases like 'completely decimated' and 'totally decimated' are self-contradictory.
The wildlife expert should not be blamed for not understanding the term; but why use long, latinate words when you don't really know what they mean? It is Television, as well as the Press, that has been spreading such misuses. And they really do weaken our language.
* 'Decimated' derives from Latin decem meaning 'ten'.
My Dear, I Feel Totally Decimated
What resonates with the pedant in me is James's lament at the deterioration of the English language in the media. "Among ordinary pens for hire", he writes, "it is no longer common to write without solecisms; even those who can are likely to bolt phrases together with no real attention to their derivation, and in too many cases their language is utterly emptied of the history that brought it into being".
I am afraid that this situation is largely due to the influence of Television, the medium through which James won his fame. Over and over again we hear presenters and news-readers and interviewed experts mangling the language, or adopting (presumably in order to be accepted as 'ordinary people') modern linguistic quirks, kerb-side idioms and popular cliches; all of which, if we stop to think about it, we can see do nothing to make their statements or opinions clearer or more authoritative: it merely makes the speakers seem superficially more 'ordinary' - so keen is their desire for 'street cred'. James himself is not above doing this sometimes - but it is always 'occasional' and in the appropriate place, somehow genuinely enlivening his prose without demeaning it. It takes a master of English language and literature to do this without vulgarity or bathos.
It was a genuine wildlife expert, I am sure, who told us recently on screen that the arrival in our country of the north American grey squirrel had 'completely decimated' the native red squirrel. Originally the term 'decimated' had the special meaning of 'eliminating one tenth' (thus leaving ninety per cent alive and kicking)*. Of course the word could be used metaphorically with less mathematical precision, to imply severely reducing a population. But phrases like 'completely decimated' and 'totally decimated' are self-contradictory.
The wildlife expert should not be blamed for not understanding the term; but why use long, latinate words when you don't really know what they mean? It is Television, as well as the Press, that has been spreading such misuses. And they really do weaken our language.
* 'Decimated' derives from Latin decem meaning 'ten'.
My Dear, I Feel Totally Decimated
Sunday, 11 October 2009
More Singular Plurality; and The Humour of M.R.James
Way back in April (it seems ages ago), this blog, under the heading Singular Plurality, considered the strange phenomenon of apparently plural words that we English treat as if they were singular - such as a golf links, a kennels, a maltings, and so on.
Now here's another - but it's not in current use because it describes a job that today is virtually extinct. Two or three generations ago, if you stayed at a hotel or inn, you could leave your shoes or boots outside the door of your room to be taken and returned, clean and shining, before you went out next morning. And the servant who dealt with that was known as 'the boots'. I was reminded of this the other day by one of M.R.James's ghost stories, 'A Warning to the Curious', in which the narrator and his friend returned to their inn after a late evening walk, and found that "the boots was on the look-out for us".
As a person interested in the language and the history of our Anglo-Saxon forebears, I am familiar with some of M.R.James's other writings, some of them academic, others more popular, but all well written and easy to read. What his more serious books and articles don't reveal (unsurprisingly) is his sense of humour. Nor would you expect to find it in his spooky ghost stories.
But every now and then it shows up, especially when he creates a 'wordy' character, in the tradition of Sheridan's Mrs Malaprop or some of the personalities in Dickens. It is perhaps in the story Mr Humphreys and his Inheritance that James is at his most Dickensian. A Mr Humphreys has just inherited a large property in Eastern England, and when he at last gets there he is greeted by the estate bailiff, Mr Cooper, and his wife.
"I'll take it upon myself to assure you, sir, that a warm welcome awaits you on all sides. And as to any change of propriety turning out detrimental to the neighbourhood . . . ." Mr Cooper decides not to pursue that line of thought any further. A little later he remarks to his wife "I was just saying to Mr Humphreys, my dear, that I hope and trust that his residence among us will be marked as a red-letter day".
"Yes, indeed, I'm sure," said Mrs Cooper heartily, "and many, many of them."
The death of Humphrey's late uncle, the former owner of the property, arises in the conversation.
"Yes, poor man", says Humphreys to Cooper. "Did he suffer from any special disorder before his last illness - which, I take it, was little more than old age ?"
"Just that, Mr Humphreys - just that. The flash flickering slowly away in the pan," said Cooper, with what he considered an appropriate gesture, - "the golden bowl gradually ceasing to vibrate."
And later Mr Cooper comments: "I can see that you've found your meatear here, Mr Humphreys: you'll make this place a regular signosier before many seasons have passed over our heads."
M.R.James, who lived from 1862 to 1936, was an extraordinarily talented man, a transcriber, cataloguer and interpreter of ancient manuscripts and inscriptions, a linguist capable of conversing in some four or five modern languages and reading in three or four ancient ones, an antiquary whose explorations had enabled him to study hundreds and hundreds of churches, both in Britain and abroad, a skilled writer not only on academic subjects but also of ghost stories, and in turns a Museum Director, Provost of King's College, Cambridge, Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, and Provost of Eton College.
What a pity he did not have more opportunity - or inclination - to write humorous stories !
More Singular Plurality: and The Humour of M.R.James
Now here's another - but it's not in current use because it describes a job that today is virtually extinct. Two or three generations ago, if you stayed at a hotel or inn, you could leave your shoes or boots outside the door of your room to be taken and returned, clean and shining, before you went out next morning. And the servant who dealt with that was known as 'the boots'. I was reminded of this the other day by one of M.R.James's ghost stories, 'A Warning to the Curious', in which the narrator and his friend returned to their inn after a late evening walk, and found that "the boots was on the look-out for us".
As a person interested in the language and the history of our Anglo-Saxon forebears, I am familiar with some of M.R.James's other writings, some of them academic, others more popular, but all well written and easy to read. What his more serious books and articles don't reveal (unsurprisingly) is his sense of humour. Nor would you expect to find it in his spooky ghost stories.
But every now and then it shows up, especially when he creates a 'wordy' character, in the tradition of Sheridan's Mrs Malaprop or some of the personalities in Dickens. It is perhaps in the story Mr Humphreys and his Inheritance that James is at his most Dickensian. A Mr Humphreys has just inherited a large property in Eastern England, and when he at last gets there he is greeted by the estate bailiff, Mr Cooper, and his wife.
"I'll take it upon myself to assure you, sir, that a warm welcome awaits you on all sides. And as to any change of propriety turning out detrimental to the neighbourhood . . . ." Mr Cooper decides not to pursue that line of thought any further. A little later he remarks to his wife "I was just saying to Mr Humphreys, my dear, that I hope and trust that his residence among us will be marked as a red-letter day".
"Yes, indeed, I'm sure," said Mrs Cooper heartily, "and many, many of them."
The death of Humphrey's late uncle, the former owner of the property, arises in the conversation.
"Yes, poor man", says Humphreys to Cooper. "Did he suffer from any special disorder before his last illness - which, I take it, was little more than old age ?"
"Just that, Mr Humphreys - just that. The flash flickering slowly away in the pan," said Cooper, with what he considered an appropriate gesture, - "the golden bowl gradually ceasing to vibrate."
And later Mr Cooper comments: "I can see that you've found your meatear here, Mr Humphreys: you'll make this place a regular signosier before many seasons have passed over our heads."
M.R.James, who lived from 1862 to 1936, was an extraordinarily talented man, a transcriber, cataloguer and interpreter of ancient manuscripts and inscriptions, a linguist capable of conversing in some four or five modern languages and reading in three or four ancient ones, an antiquary whose explorations had enabled him to study hundreds and hundreds of churches, both in Britain and abroad, a skilled writer not only on academic subjects but also of ghost stories, and in turns a Museum Director, Provost of King's College, Cambridge, Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, and Provost of Eton College.
What a pity he did not have more opportunity - or inclination - to write humorous stories !
More Singular Plurality: and The Humour of M.R.James
Thursday, 28 May 2009
Extraordinaire !
One doesn’t often stop to consider this, but it is extraordinary how many French words our language has absorbed since about 1450. Most of the English words with French origins entered our language further back even than that, in a period when English kings still held extensive lands in France. Many of the kings from William the Conqueror on were virtually Anglo-French, and their families and the nobles and many leading churchmen spoke the language as well or better than they spoke English. If you take a passage of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Chaucer died in 1400) you may expect to find an average of (say) one French-derived word in every ten-syllable line - often the longer words, like countrefete, superfluytee, lecherye, difference, dampnacioun, compaignye - so that in terms of syllables, some 20%* of Chaucer's output may consist of words that only entered the English language in the previous four hundred years.
* This is not official: it is this pedant's guess after hastily perusing some of the Tales and making calculations. I am sure others will have noticed this before me, but I get the impression that some of the tales have more 'French' words in them than others. Perhaps this shows Chaucer modifying the language of each tale to suit the status of the teller.
But that was all in the twelfth to fifteenth centuries. It’s not those earlier words that I want to talk about here. I’m amazed at the number of French words that we have adopted in the five centuries since Chaucer right up to the present day. Some of them are cooking terms, of course - crêpe suzette, marinade, hors d’oeuvres and so on. But I have listed hundreds of others, some from every-day conversation (avant-garde, brochure, chalet, débris, élite, fiancé, garage, hospice, intrigue, journal, language - we could run through the alphabet with familiar examples), and others less frequently on our lips, but recognisable as soon as we hear or read them, such as camaraderie, bourgeoisie, pointillism(e), renaissance, badinage . . . . .
What set me going on this topic was noticing how many of the words in my list started with the letter C; so I counted them, and found they totalled exactly 100: capsule, camouflage, carousel, catalogue, chalet, coterie, compère, chagrin, cliché, champagne, collage, crèche, courtesan, courgette and over eighty others.
The list is still growing.
So what ? (I thought I had better say that before you do.)
Extraordinaire !
* This is not official: it is this pedant's guess after hastily perusing some of the Tales and making calculations. I am sure others will have noticed this before me, but I get the impression that some of the tales have more 'French' words in them than others. Perhaps this shows Chaucer modifying the language of each tale to suit the status of the teller.
But that was all in the twelfth to fifteenth centuries. It’s not those earlier words that I want to talk about here. I’m amazed at the number of French words that we have adopted in the five centuries since Chaucer right up to the present day. Some of them are cooking terms, of course - crêpe suzette, marinade, hors d’oeuvres and so on. But I have listed hundreds of others, some from every-day conversation (avant-garde, brochure, chalet, débris, élite, fiancé, garage, hospice, intrigue, journal, language - we could run through the alphabet with familiar examples), and others less frequently on our lips, but recognisable as soon as we hear or read them, such as camaraderie, bourgeoisie, pointillism(e), renaissance, badinage . . . . .
What set me going on this topic was noticing how many of the words in my list started with the letter C; so I counted them, and found they totalled exactly 100: capsule, camouflage, carousel, catalogue, chalet, coterie, compère, chagrin, cliché, champagne, collage, crèche, courtesan, courgette and over eighty others.
The list is still growing.
So what ? (I thought I had better say that before you do.)
Extraordinaire !
Saturday, 23 May 2009
Degrees of keyness
If the (indispensible) Radio Times provides a large proportion of the solecisms and linguistic infelicities that fuel this blog, that other necessary weekly publication The Week provides a useful extra helping.
“Most environmentalists claim that changing the way we travel - better timetabling for public transport, car sharing, etc - is just as key as altering car technology”, we read in the current issue of The Week.
We’ll overlook the otiose comma after the phrase ‘car sharing’ (after all, it doesn’t much spoil the flow): but the phrase ‘just as key’ is poor English, jargon of the kind favoured by the lesser orders of journalists and publicists. You can’t compare ‘keyness’. You should think again if you find phrases like ‘more key’ or ‘very key’ creeping into your speech.
If we speak of a ‘key point’ in (say) legislation, we use the term ‘key’ not as an adjective, but as a ‘noun in apposition’. You might speak of a ‘landmark decision’: but would you ever suggest that a particular decision is ‘landmarker’ than another ? Is a projected ‘gala concert’ intended to be ‘more gala’ than others ? And (as this pedant has whinged before) could you reasonably assert that your village jumble sale is ‘just as mammoth’ as that of that of your neighbours ? Or even that an entertainer’s ‘star performance’ is ‘the starest ever’ ?
Degrees of keyness
“Most environmentalists claim that changing the way we travel - better timetabling for public transport, car sharing, etc - is just as key as altering car technology”, we read in the current issue of The Week.
We’ll overlook the otiose comma after the phrase ‘car sharing’ (after all, it doesn’t much spoil the flow): but the phrase ‘just as key’ is poor English, jargon of the kind favoured by the lesser orders of journalists and publicists. You can’t compare ‘keyness’. You should think again if you find phrases like ‘more key’ or ‘very key’ creeping into your speech.
If we speak of a ‘key point’ in (say) legislation, we use the term ‘key’ not as an adjective, but as a ‘noun in apposition’. You might speak of a ‘landmark decision’: but would you ever suggest that a particular decision is ‘landmarker’ than another ? Is a projected ‘gala concert’ intended to be ‘more gala’ than others ? And (as this pedant has whinged before) could you reasonably assert that your village jumble sale is ‘just as mammoth’ as that of that of your neighbours ? Or even that an entertainer’s ‘star performance’ is ‘the starest ever’ ?
Degrees of keyness
Wednesday, 29 April 2009
Getting away with it - the 'Author's Alibi'
E’en Homer nods, as someone said*; or at least he may seem to nod. But an author can often claim an excuse for slips of the quill. When P.G.Wodehouse writes of a certain Harold, a page-boy, the words he uses are “He’s practically circular, and every time I’ve seen him he’s been leaning up against something half asleep”.
* quoting the Latin of the Roman poet Horace; “Indignor quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus’. ‘I feel uncomfortable whenever good old Homer nods off’.
We all know, do we not, and are glad to have the opportunity to point out, are we not, that circular means round in two dimensions, but three-dimensional roundness is correctly described as spherical.
“You and I are certainly aware of that”, P. G .W. might reply, “but you will notice that I have put these words in the mouth of Bertie Wooster, whose grasp of linguistic correctness is far from perfect.”
“Of course, of course, how silly of us”, we mutter, and wish we had kept our mouths shut. You see, P.G.W. is exercising the Author’s Alibi.
That’s why Agatha Christie can get away with writing “Try and vary your methods as you will, your tastes, your habits, your attitude of mind, and your soul is revealed by your action”. Not only is the punctuation a bit ambiguous and dodgy (the first of the four commas might be better as a colon, and the last one shouldn’t be there at all) but the singular verb ‘is’ cannot be right. But it’s not Christie's mistake: it’s Poirot speaking, and he, poor chap, is a Belgian and it is unfair to expect him to speak impeccable English. Mind you, that hardly explains the punctuation, but perhaps Christie can blame that on a dozy typesetter.
Emily Bronte’s character Isabella Heathcliff, speaking of her awful husband, remarks “His forehead, that once I thought so manly, and that now I think so diabolical, was shaded with a heavy cloud . . .” Here we seem to have a pair of wicked ‘thats’ that should have been ‘whiches’. But Isabella was under great stress on this occasion, and it would have been very bad manners for Nell Dean (only a housekeeper, even though her speech was nearly always very posh and proper) to correct her. Emily B. can plead that she is merely representing Isabella as somewhat distraught.
And what of this passage from Max Beerbohm ? “I might have said, ‘Going to the Play,’ which was a familiar phrase in the Victorian and Edvardian <sic>eras. . . Going to what play ? There was always more than one. . .” Now the punctuation might be improved (note the comma within the phrase ‘Going to the Play,’ when it would be more logical after it): but a severer quibble concerns the statement ‘There was always more than one’. Surely ‘more than one’ implies two or more, and so needs the plural verb ‘were’ before it.
Max’s defence might easily be that his words were uttered in an informal BBC broadcast in 1945. His style is certainly literary, but relaxed literary. Even the most correct of pedants should know when it’s acceptable, even desirable, to slip into casual mode. But if pushed he might have agreed that however spontaneous he wanted his little radio chat to sound, the text was in fact very carefully crafted: and that ‘There were always . . .’ doesn’t really sound any more formal than ‘There was always . . .”
Getting away with it - the 'Author’s Alibi'
* quoting the Latin of the Roman poet Horace; “Indignor quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus’. ‘I feel uncomfortable whenever good old Homer nods off’.
We all know, do we not, and are glad to have the opportunity to point out, are we not, that circular means round in two dimensions, but three-dimensional roundness is correctly described as spherical.
“You and I are certainly aware of that”, P. G .W. might reply, “but you will notice that I have put these words in the mouth of Bertie Wooster, whose grasp of linguistic correctness is far from perfect.”
“Of course, of course, how silly of us”, we mutter, and wish we had kept our mouths shut. You see, P.G.W. is exercising the Author’s Alibi.
That’s why Agatha Christie can get away with writing “Try and vary your methods as you will, your tastes, your habits, your attitude of mind, and your soul is revealed by your action”. Not only is the punctuation a bit ambiguous and dodgy (the first of the four commas might be better as a colon, and the last one shouldn’t be there at all) but the singular verb ‘is’ cannot be right. But it’s not Christie's mistake: it’s Poirot speaking, and he, poor chap, is a Belgian and it is unfair to expect him to speak impeccable English. Mind you, that hardly explains the punctuation, but perhaps Christie can blame that on a dozy typesetter.
Emily Bronte’s character Isabella Heathcliff, speaking of her awful husband, remarks “His forehead, that once I thought so manly, and that now I think so diabolical, was shaded with a heavy cloud . . .” Here we seem to have a pair of wicked ‘thats’ that should have been ‘whiches’. But Isabella was under great stress on this occasion, and it would have been very bad manners for Nell Dean (only a housekeeper, even though her speech was nearly always very posh and proper) to correct her. Emily B. can plead that she is merely representing Isabella as somewhat distraught.
And what of this passage from Max Beerbohm ? “I might have said, ‘Going to the Play,’ which was a familiar phrase in the Victorian and Edvardian <sic>
Max’s defence might easily be that his words were uttered in an informal BBC broadcast in 1945. His style is certainly literary, but relaxed literary. Even the most correct of pedants should know when it’s acceptable, even desirable, to slip into casual mode. But if pushed he might have agreed that however spontaneous he wanted his little radio chat to sound, the text was in fact very carefully crafted: and that ‘There were always . . .’ doesn’t really sound any more formal than ‘There was always . . .”
Getting away with it - the 'Author’s Alibi'
Thursday, 19 March 2009
The singular they, and coming to fruition
It's a pity our language lacks a singular pronoun that can refer equally well to a man or a woman. We end up saying "Whoever has a winning ticket can choose whatever they like from the prizes on the table" - because 'he or she' sounds clumsy - and there might even be someone present who will object "Why not she or he ?"
But when we are talking of persons auditioning for the part of Nancy in the musical 'Oliver', is it not safe to assume that the role will be given to a woman ? So ingrained is the use of the 'singular they' that an unthinking journalist on the staff of Radio Times wrote last year "One of the finalists for the part of Nancy sees their dream end as they are asked to leave the competition."
Here's another RT howler from the same issue: "Rageh Omar continues his investigation into whether fears about the dilution of British culture have come to fruition."
As so often, a journalist who doesn’t know the meaning of English words, but can’t resist what seems a good cliché, puts his metaphorical foot in it. Unless you’re something of a sadist, fears don’t come to fruition: 'fruition' means enjoyment, benefit. The Latin verb 'fruor' means to enjoy. Sweet, juicy apples are the enjoyment you get as a reward for all your hard work cultivating the orchard; so the very word 'fruit' is a metaphor of enjoyment. What may be the cause of the confusion is our almost instinctive use of 'fruit' as a metaphor for the results of something - after all, some ‘fruits’ are poisonous: negatively we might say "sinners will reap what they sow". But when we say "my efforts have been fruitful", we are (quite correctly) speaking positively of the enjoyment of success.
'Fruition' (from Latin noun fruitio from the verb fruor) is always positive; fears are always about something negative, so when they are 'realised' (ie 'come true’) or 'justified' (ie 'proved correct') they do not lead to fruition - only to disappointment, frustration or despair..
BBC’s Radio Times has in recent years become less and less careful in its language. Almost every week it publishes statements that are ungrammatical or plain stupid. We may forgive such errors in conversation or in interviews - even experts experience slips of the tongue. But it is not unreasonable to expect professional writers and editors to know the basics of their trade.
The singular they, and coming to fruition
But when we are talking of persons auditioning for the part of Nancy in the musical 'Oliver', is it not safe to assume that the role will be given to a woman ? So ingrained is the use of the 'singular they' that an unthinking journalist on the staff of Radio Times wrote last year "One of the finalists for the part of Nancy sees their dream end as they are asked to leave the competition."
Here's another RT howler from the same issue: "Rageh Omar continues his investigation into whether fears about the dilution of British culture have come to fruition."
As so often, a journalist who doesn’t know the meaning of English words, but can’t resist what seems a good cliché, puts his metaphorical foot in it. Unless you’re something of a sadist, fears don’t come to fruition: 'fruition' means enjoyment, benefit. The Latin verb 'fruor' means to enjoy. Sweet, juicy apples are the enjoyment you get as a reward for all your hard work cultivating the orchard; so the very word 'fruit' is a metaphor of enjoyment. What may be the cause of the confusion is our almost instinctive use of 'fruit' as a metaphor for the results of something - after all, some ‘fruits’ are poisonous: negatively we might say "sinners will reap what they sow". But when we say "my efforts have been fruitful", we are (quite correctly) speaking positively of the enjoyment of success.
'Fruition' (from Latin noun fruitio from the verb fruor) is always positive; fears are always about something negative, so when they are 'realised' (ie 'come true’) or 'justified' (ie 'proved correct') they do not lead to fruition - only to disappointment, frustration or despair..
BBC’s Radio Times has in recent years become less and less careful in its language. Almost every week it publishes statements that are ungrammatical or plain stupid. We may forgive such errors in conversation or in interviews - even experts experience slips of the tongue. But it is not unreasonable to expect professional writers and editors to know the basics of their trade.
The singular they, and coming to fruition
Thursday, 12 March 2009
Multilingual, polyglot and many-tongued
Most of us are aware that our Anglo-Saxon ancestors spoke Old English, but that our language was subsequently enriched from (among others) two main sources: Norman and Angevin French, whose language had evolved from vernacular Latin; and renaissance scholars’ use of classical Latin and Greek. So very often we have in our vocabulary word-synonyms derived from three ancient languages.
When I came across the fairly common term 'polychromatic' recently, I found myself mentally translating it, as it were, into 'multi-coloured', and then again in to 'many-hued'. They all mean the same thing, but (one might say) in three different languages.
'Poly-', 'multi-' and 'many-' all mean the same in Greek, Latin and English respectively. Chrōma is Greek for English 'hue', and color is the Latin equivalent. Any apparent nuances of meaning derive from their association: 'polychrome' sounds rather technical and scientific; 'many-hued' sounds a little bit archaic, deliberately old-fashioned or poetical. It is the Latin derived 'multi-coloured' that now seems most neutral to us.
But how useful to have the choice !
Multilingual, polyglot and many-tongued
When I came across the fairly common term 'polychromatic' recently, I found myself mentally translating it, as it were, into 'multi-coloured', and then again in to 'many-hued'. They all mean the same thing, but (one might say) in three different languages.
'Poly-', 'multi-' and 'many-' all mean the same in Greek, Latin and English respectively. Chrōma is Greek for English 'hue', and color is the Latin equivalent. Any apparent nuances of meaning derive from their association: 'polychrome' sounds rather technical and scientific; 'many-hued' sounds a little bit archaic, deliberately old-fashioned or poetical. It is the Latin derived 'multi-coloured' that now seems most neutral to us.
But how useful to have the choice !
Multilingual, polyglot and many-tongued
Thursday, 5 March 2009
theguardian on English Language
In a local charity shop I bought yesterday a slim paperback book published last year by theguardian <sic> titled The Guardian Book of English Language. The text is ‘extracted from Guardian Style’, the paper’s official advice to its own journalists.
The authors cheerfully, and without any sign of regret, refer to the days when that paper’s typestting was so erratic that Private Eye always called it ‘The Grauniad’. But the advice offered in this booklet’s pages is of very variable quality, and not always well expressed: slickness seems to have been the aim rather than clarity. The following extract, for instance, can be interpreted if you work hard at it; but if you are capable of deciphering it, you probably don’t need its advice anyway:
“it’s or its?
it’s shortened form of it is or has: it’s a big dog, it’s been ages since I saw her; its possessive form of it: the dog is eating its bone.”
The next entry, “like or as if?” advises against the usage “it looks like he’s finished”. All right, probably true for academic papers and prim journalism: but this ‘vernacular’ use is so common now in novels, advertisements, popular magazines and newspapers that I would be very surprised if it hasn’t ever appeared in the pages of The Guardian itself. The truth is that a writer needs to be able to sense when it may or may not be appropriate to lapse deliberately into popular idiom.
Following that, comes “may or might” which closes with a short sentence: “May also has the meaning of ‘having permission’, so be careful: does ‘Megawatt Corp may bid for TransElectric Inc’ mean that it is considering a bid, or that the competition authorities have allowed it to bid ?” A fair question: but no answer or advice follows.
Next again comes “metaphor: Traditionally defined as the application to one thing of a name belonging to another, eg bowling blitz, economic meltdown, ‘every language is a temple in which the soul of those who speak it is enshrined’ (Oliver Wendell Holmes)”. Not a lot of help to a person seeking advice on correct writing.
The advice offered in the next two entries (“none” and “one in six, one in 10, etc”) seems, if not actually wrong, at least debatable. After all this, there are still about 100 more pages to go. But two things are sure: first, almost all ‘prescriptions’ for good writing require qualification; and secondly, you shouldn't expect total agreement among pedants.
theguardian on English Language
The authors cheerfully, and without any sign of regret, refer to the days when that paper’s typestting was so erratic that Private Eye always called it ‘The Grauniad’. But the advice offered in this booklet’s pages is of very variable quality, and not always well expressed: slickness seems to have been the aim rather than clarity. The following extract, for instance, can be interpreted if you work hard at it; but if you are capable of deciphering it, you probably don’t need its advice anyway:
“it’s or its?
it’s shortened form of it is or has: it’s a big dog, it’s been ages since I saw her; its possessive form of it: the dog is eating its bone.”
The next entry, “like or as if?” advises against the usage “it looks like he’s finished”. All right, probably true for academic papers and prim journalism: but this ‘vernacular’ use is so common now in novels, advertisements, popular magazines and newspapers that I would be very surprised if it hasn’t ever appeared in the pages of The Guardian itself. The truth is that a writer needs to be able to sense when it may or may not be appropriate to lapse deliberately into popular idiom.
Following that, comes “may or might” which closes with a short sentence: “May also has the meaning of ‘having permission’, so be careful: does ‘Megawatt Corp may bid for TransElectric Inc’ mean that it is considering a bid, or that the competition authorities have allowed it to bid ?” A fair question: but no answer or advice follows.
Next again comes “metaphor: Traditionally defined as the application to one thing of a name belonging to another, eg bowling blitz, economic meltdown, ‘every language is a temple in which the soul of those who speak it is enshrined’ (Oliver Wendell Holmes)”. Not a lot of help to a person seeking advice on correct writing.
The advice offered in the next two entries (“none” and “one in six, one in 10, etc”) seems, if not actually wrong, at least debatable. After all this, there are still about 100 more pages to go. But two things are sure: first, almost all ‘prescriptions’ for good writing require qualification; and secondly, you shouldn't expect total agreement among pedants.
theguardian on English Language
Wednesday, 25 February 2009
Brain disengaged
It has been said by male chauvinist pigs (there’s a super-hackneyed cliché for you) that “knitting is something for women to think about when they’re talking”. But the following utterances were all made by male television reporters or interviewees in the year 2008:
“Bernard Matthews will continue to take its toll” (referring to outbreak of bird flu or some such disease in the firm's turkey houses).
“Houses have to be built with adaptations ready made” (re accommodation for the elderly).
“ . . . to make sure the toads get across the road in one piece” (explaining why special crossings have been made for them).
The last example was no doubt semi-facetious (though we may wonder how a toad could ever get across the road in more than one piece), and the middle one could be justified by saying that the term 'adapt' doesn't govern the physical structure of the house, but (abstract) traditional design: but if you can’t see anything strange about these statements, spare a little time to think them through carefully.
Brain disengaged
“Bernard Matthews will continue to take its toll” (referring to outbreak of bird flu or some such disease in the firm's turkey houses).
“Houses have to be built with adaptations ready made” (re accommodation for the elderly).
“ . . . to make sure the toads get across the road in one piece” (explaining why special crossings have been made for them).
The last example was no doubt semi-facetious (though we may wonder how a toad could ever get across the road in more than one piece), and the middle one could be justified by saying that the term 'adapt' doesn't govern the physical structure of the house, but (abstract) traditional design: but if you can’t see anything strange about these statements, spare a little time to think them through carefully.
Brain disengaged
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