Latin is technically dead: no-one speaks it any more. But we would be so lost if we couldn’t use Latin’s littlies — those handy abbreviations that pepper our written and spoken communications, i.e. e.g., cf., P.S., n.b., etc. etc.
As seemingly benign as they are tiny, these shortcuts actually carry their own little interesting confusions and usage questions, which we don’t usually stop to think about. Since the abbreviations are there to save time and keystrokes, why waste any more time on them?
Let’s take Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, which prompted a hugely important national debate that continues to this day: how should we abbreviate the word versus, and how do we pronounce it when we’re saying it aloud? Should it be written as Roe v. Wade, Roe vs. Wade, Roe v Wade, or Roe vs Wade? Or even, possibly, Roe versus Wade? And should it be said aloud as “Roe versus Wade” or “Roe vee Wade”? These are big questions… Continue reading →
They’ve given us kilts; they’ve given us bagpipes. Haggis? You can choose to take it or leave it, but thanks to our northern numpties (q.v.), the Brits can offer our own item of exotic culinary fare. I thought they might have given us windbag (I mean, look at the image above), but that was just false speculation on my part. No, they’re smart, witty, left-wing and eloquent, and they’ve given the world Sean Connery and an accent sexy enough to stir anyone’s loins — even if we can’t understand a word they’re saying. Och aye the noo: we’re talking about the Scots, who right now are giving their British compatriots nothing but sweaty palms and heart palpitations as we await the results of their historic referendum on Thursday … Will they stay, or will they go?
But how many people know that they have also given us glamour, golf and gumption? Those are just three of a number of words that find their origins in the Scottish Highlands (or Lowlands): more such words are listed below, with their back-stories. Whereas some seem to wear their Highland homeland easily on their sleeves (such as caddy, clan, gloaming and wee), there are a few surprises in there. Who knew, for example, that we had the Scots to thank for pony, blatant and raid? My favorite discovery is that glamour, with its early Scottish meaning of magic, derives from the word grammar. Aye, that’s bonnie.
blackmail: a tribute levied by freebooting Scottish chieftans or Border Reivers who ran protection rackets against Scottish farmers
blatant: perhaps an alternative of the Scottish blatand, meaning bleating, associated with blatterContinue reading →
It’s a strange verb, to grow. Usually we talk about things or people growing intransitively — ie. without an object. “The size of the crowd grew.” “She has grown so tall.” “The government’s power is growing.” There’s really no limit to what can grow, on its own, in an intransitive sense. However, when it comes to using the verb transitively — ie. when we’re talking about “growing something“, rather than seeing it grow under its own steam, then most bets are suddenly off: we only grow transitively when we’re referring to natural, living things. We grow plants, flowers and our own food; we grow beards, and our hair; we even grow pot-bellies — whether we like it or not. But it’s only recently that the transitive use of the verb itself has begun to grow: now embracing inanimate objects and abstract items, grow is beginning to mean “expand” — and you can grow anything from your circle of friends to an economy or an international corporation’s revenue (whereas before they grew only intransitively). The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage advises against this growing trend of growing anything unnatural transitively: “The newer usage of grow to mean expand (grow the business; grow revenue) is business jargon, best resisted.”
Disappear is anotherdodgy suspect when it comes to its transitive use. Continue reading →
TGIF. In grammar, language and usage news this fortnight: the uber-ubiquity of uber; what little words reveal about us; how economic development is driving the extinction of languages; and who was it that made up the word supercalafragilisticexpialidocious?
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In what some might call an ironic twist of fate, the ride-sharing company Uber faces a ban on one of its services in the country from which the company gets its name: Germany. Linguist Ben Zimmer talks in the Wall Street Journal about the growing ubiquity of uber: it’s uber all of us — and not just in the word’s native land.
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Our use of little words can reveal hidden interests. James Pennebaker, a psychologist interested in the secret life of pronouns, has recorded, transcribed and analyzed conversations that took place between people on speed dates. “We can predict by analyzing their language, who will go on a date — who will match — at rates better than the people themselves,” he says. And he found that “when the language style of two people matched, when they used pronouns, prepositions, articles and so forth in similar ways at similar rates, they were much more likely to end up on a date.” NPR reports how our use of little words can, uh, reveal hidden interests.
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Economic development is driving the extinction of some languages, scientists believe. A study has found that minority languages in the most developed parts of the world, including North America, Europe and Australia, are most at threat. The researchers found that the more successful a country was economically, the more rapidly its languages were being lost. The BBC reports.
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Was the word supercalafragilisticexpialidocious really made up by the Mary Poppins writers? According to mental_floss, there were others who claimed ownership. “Though the Sherman Brothers claimed they made the word up themselves, a 1949 song called “Supercalafajaistickespeealadojus” would seem to say otherwise. The writers of the song, Barney Young and Gloria Parker, sued for $12 million. They lost because lawyers were able to present evidence showing that the nonsense word had been around, in some form or another, for decades. Indeed, the Sherman Brothers later claimed that their made-up word was a variation on a similar word they had heard at summer camp back in the 1930s: ‘super-cadja-flawjalistic-espealedojus.'”
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Another word, knish, was explored on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show a few weeks ago.
Joe on his own can mean any bloke, chap or fellow.* Especially if he has average in front of his name. (It can also mean coffee, but let’s not get off topic.) To the Brits, Joe is sometimes the embodiment of an American — as in GI Joe. But when we’re talking about a hypothetical average normal ordinary guy, Joe tends to get his own surname: Bloggs if he’s British; Schmo or Blow if he’s American.
In its recent review of the coffee-making alarm clock the Barisieur, Coolest-Gadgets.com commented that “this $200-330 purchase is certainly not for the average Joe Schmoe.” [Isn’t that tautologous, “average Joe Schmoe”? Isn’t he average by definition?] And on the other side of the Atlantic, “the general Joe Bloggs you meet in the street or at Sainsbury’s may have watched women’s rugby a bit on TV,” English rugby player Maggie Alphonsi was quoted as saying in TheIndependent. Continue reading →
We all know what a blunder is; we all make mistakes. Google the wordand you’ll read about some seriously red-faced people whose boobs were blabbed to the world: just yesterday, ITV News reported that “Fifty Shades director left red-faced over gun blunder”; “CDC Scientist Kept Quiet About Flu Blunder” and “Eardrop blunder could have left Valerie deaf” were recent headlines screaming people’s boo-boos. Dating back to the mid-14th century, when it meant “to stumble about blindly,” from a Scandinavian source akin to the Old Norse blundra, meaning to “shut one’s eyes,” blunder means not just any old mistake — but a stupid or embarrassing mistake. Isn’t it good to know that we were making and talking about stupid mistakes seven centuries ago?
Now try Googling boner — supposedly a synonym of blunder in North American slang — and you might be the red-faced one. Nowadays it is slang for an erection (probably derived from bone-on in the 1940s) — but it wasn’t always that way. Continue reading →
TGIF. In language and usage news this fortnight: grammar rules that can sometimes be broken; a socialite’s guide to elegant expletives; a mispronunciation leads to the renaming of a TV show (if only briefly); the fading art of diagramming sentences; and a childhood spelling error of adult proportions.
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“You shudder at a split infinitive, know when to use ‘that’ or ‘which’ and would never confuse ‘less’ with ‘fewer’ – but are these rules always right, elegant or sensible?” In The Guardian, linguist Steven Pinker identifies 10 ‘grammar rules’ it’s OK to break (sometimes). Continue reading →
There was a profoundly important moment at last night’s Emmy Awards: when Chris Hardwick got up and gave the world’s internet trolls a dressing down for not getting their grammar right.
“There’s one very important message and I wanted to use the Emmy stage as a global stage to get this message out … It’s very important … I want them to listen … This is very important, trolls, please. Understand what I’m about to tell you, and write it down. ‘Your’ — Y-O-U-R — is a possessive pronoun. ‘You’re’ — Y-O-U-apostrophe-R-E — is the contraction of ‘you are’. As in ‘you’re bad at your grammar.’ Thank you.”
Thank you, Chris. And internet trolls: learn your lesson well. We’re watching you …
Nowadays it seems to be good etiquette to pronounce loanwords as closely to their native pronunciation as possible. So how do the Yanks and Brits fare comparatively in the face of this challenge? Brits are known to lean more towards pronouncing words literally/phonetically as their English spellings prescribe, whatever their origins; Americans, on the other hand, are more bravely inclined to try and approximate the original pronunciation — even if the attempt is ultimately misguided. (The subject of “hyperforeignisms is tackled further down — and Eddie Izzard puts in his two cents too.) As well as the particular sound of the word’s vowels and consonants, it’s also a matter of syllable emphasis that helps determine how much a word sounds like its foreign forebears.
Although Americans and Brits tend to agree on the pronunciation of most of their linguistic immigrants, there are a number of words that we approach differently depending on which side of the Atlantic we’re from. Here’s a selection of those words, and I’ve denoted with a larger flag the nation that seems to come closer to the original pronunciation (based on both sounds and syllable emphasis). Strangely enough, despite the theory above about Brits sticking to their own phonetic rules, 9 of the 16 words below are pronounced more “authentically” by the Brits, at least by my reckoning. Go figure.
herb: HERB ERB
croissant: KWAH-song kruh-SAHNT
valet: VAL-lett val-LAY
fillet: FILL-uht fi-LAY
mauve: MOHV (rhymes with drove) MOV
crepe: CREP CRAYP
address (noun, postal sense): a-DRESS ADD-ress
cigarette: si-guh-RET SI-guh-ret
paella: pah-YEAH-luh pah-YAY-yuh
basil: BAZ-il BAY-zil
lieutenant: lef-TEN-uhnt loo-TEN-uhnt
humo(u)r: HYOO-muh YOO-murr
Van Gogh: van-GOKH (like “loch”, Lochness) or van-GOFF van-GO
schedule: SHED-yool SKED-yool
Risotto: rih-ZOT-toe rih-ZOH-toe
Pasta: PASS-tuh (“pass” like “lass”) PAH-stuh
Please add other words to the comments section below.
Now we come to “hyperforeignisms”: this is where English-speakers try unsuccessfully to emulate the pronunciation of the word’s original language — by getting either the country of origin or the native pronunciation wrong.
Take the word parmesan. Althoughit names an Italian cheese, it actually derives its spelling from French and therefore should sound like PARM-uh-zan (and that’s how Brits verbalize the stuff they sprinkle on their spaghetti). However, it is often mispronounced as parm-uh-ZHAHN by Americans, who are presumably trying to approximate the Italian name for the cheese — parmigiano, which ispronounced parm-uh-ZHAHN-o in Italian). Sorry guys: it’s a French word.
Lingerie is another one. Americans often call their intimate clothing luhn-juh-RAY — making the final syllable sound like the many French loanwords that end in -é, -er, -et and -ez and arepronounced “-AY”. Yes, lingerie is a French word. But it ends in ‘ie’ – and that sounds like ‘ee’, not ‘ay’. Oy. Repartee also falls into this category: even though it’s from the French word repartie (which sounds like party with a “re” in front), it’s often pronounced by Americans as reparTAY.
Here’s an interesting one. Forte — when referring to a personal strength, something you’re especially good at (or, in fencing, the strongest part of a sword) — comes from the French word, meaning “strong”, and therefore the final ‘e’ should be silent: “FORT”. This shouldn’t be confused with the Italian word forte, which means loud, whose final ‘e’ is pronounced “AY”. But we all say FORT-ay when we’re talking about our personal strengths — just proving that pronunciation isn’t necessarily one of them. Hey — it sounds foreign, so surely we must be saying it correctly.
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Let’s give Eddie Izzard the last word on this subject of pronunciation. Take it away, Eddie:
At least three times in the last few weeks I’ve heard friends and colleagues talk about an event or occasion “coming round the bend” — meaning, I assumed in each case, that it’s just around the corner: it will be happening before we know it. It’s coming down the pike.
Elvis did sing about a train coming ’round the bend, and Will Rogers captained the madcap “Steamboat Round the Bend” …
… but these were clearly references to vehicles traveling round a geographical bend.
