In the news

The weird word of this week is hederigerent. See its definition below.

In the news this week: a language error by the Ukrainians; some poetic abstract nouns that no longer exist; bad spelling in the baseball stadium; and getting your spelling and punctuation right when you’re in court …

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Shortly after taking power, Ukraine’s new government made the unforced error of revoking a 2012 law granting the Russian language an official status (alongside Ukrainian) in regions where Russian-speakers predominate, according to an article in The Economist.

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mental_floss brings us 14 abstract nouns that once graced our language but eventually became obsolete. Terribility and fewty: how have we managed without you?

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A Red Sox fan doesn’t seem to mind showing a baseball stadium how bad her spelling is. Deadspin helped her bad spelling go viral.

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Watch your ps, qs, spaces and dots — especially if you’re making a legal claim for collateral from a company going bankrupt. In a recent bankruptcy court ruling, a creditor lost its security interest in the assets of a bankrupt company because it left two periods and one space out of its paper work. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has the story.

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Weird word of the week: hederigerent: adjective, “bearing or ornamented with ivy”. Etymology is unknown.

Spelling pigs

We’ve all heard of spelling bees – and we’ll be reading all about them in the run-up to the big bee next month, as kids compete in regional bees around the country hoping to win a coveted place in the Scripps National Spelling Bee final in May.

Now here’s a question: is it conceivable that a pig will one day enter — and even win — the National Spelling Bee? Will we be talking about spelling pigs as well as spelling bees? The idea might not be as far-fetched as it sounds, given the unexpected findings of a recent study by English psychologists examining the language acquisition skills of non-human mammals.

In a 4-year study by scientists at the University of Sheffield in the UK, involving 240 pigs of four different breeds — Vietnamese Potbellies, British Lops, German Landraces, and Guinea Hogs — the little porkies were given instructions directing them to eat, drink, wash or lie down using simple verbal imperatives – such as “EAT FOOD” or “DRINK WATER”, and the instructions were enhanced by accompanying spoken directives. The study was designed to assess porcine reading and word recognition skills observed — sometimes quite notably — in particular breeds. But an error by one of the study technicians, at a hog-farm in Nether Edge, produced a surprising result in the porcine subjects: when a simple spelling error was inadvertently introduced (in this case it was the transposition of two letters), the normally literate pigs didn’t follow the instructions, and in some cases they became mildly agitated or displayed unusual behavior. One Guinea Hog circled around his tail for several minutes; a Vietnamese Potbelly lifted his head and snout and sniffed in the air repeatedly. To investigate this surprising observation, further spelling errors of different types (ie. dropped letters, letter substitutions) were introduced into the study, and researchers found that a significant proportion of the literate pigs failed to respond to familiar instructions that they had previously followed. The results of the study were published last week in the Journal of Language Development and Acquisition, vol. xvi.

Linguists in Denmark hope to replicate the experiment using other breeds of swine; if the results can be corroborated by similar responses in Danish Landraces (whose spatial recognition skills aren’t as pronounced as those of their German cousins), we should prepare for the eventuality of little piggies stealing crowns from diminutive spelling champions. As George Harrison asked and observed:

“Have you seen the bigger piggies
In their starched white shirts?
You will find the bigger piggies
Stirring up the dirt
Always have clean shirts to play around in” …

Humbled — or uncomfortably proud?

When Jonathan Ive — the Apple tech guy behind the iPod and other iDevices — was given a knighthood back in 2012, he spoke of his gratitude and delight: “To be recognised with this honour is absolutely thrilling and I am both humbled and sincerely grateful.”

It’s become almost obligatory for anyone receiving an honor nowadays to speak publicly of feeling humbled. Those who utter the word while clutching their trophy or rising from the tap of the Queen’s sword are invariably hoping to convey a sense of modesty and unworthiness: it’s a common way of expressing a sense of pride while at the same time trying to avoid ownership of that deadly human sin.

In fact, claiming to be humbled by an honor, award or any kind of social elevation is turning the word on its head. As someone argued on an online discussion board, “It may be argued that many of those expounding their humility are anything but humble!!”

Humble (the adjective) is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as 1. having or showing a low estimate of one’s own importance; (of an action, thought, etc.) offered with or affected by such an estimate; lacking assertion, deferential, or 2. of lowly rank or condition; modest; (of a thing) of modest dimensions, pretensions, etc. And as a verb, to humble means to lower oneself in respect or submission, or — transitively — to lower (something or someone) in dignity, position etc.; to abase. So if you’re being elevated in society’s estimation by receiving an honor, you should logically feel the opposite of humbled — even if it does feel undeserved or uncomfortable. You might argue that you felt sufficiently humble before being honored to suggest a sense of unworthiness, but afterwards the lowliness should abate rather than deepen.

Technically, you can’t really feel humbled — ie. brought down to a lower level — unless you already think highly of yourself. In the headline that Worldcrunch gave its piece about the American president’s recent meeting with the Argentine pontiff in Rome — “How Obama Was Humbled by Pope Francis” — the word was used entirely appropriately. In the presence of this lofty leader, the President did arguably feel more lowly in status, and hence he felt truly humbled.

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In the news (March 28)

Cockney rhyming slang courtesy A Salt and Battery on Facebook this week

The weird word of the week is galimatias: see its definition below.

That Gerund Is Funky … In the news this week: a deadly spelling error; sign language in Italy and dogs; the true meaning of grammar; and some ever enjoyable Yank-Brit differences.

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U.S. authorities missed several chances to detain Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev when he was traveling to and from Dagestan for his terror training, thanks partly to a deadly spelling error. On one occasion, Tsarnaev, thought to be possibly armed and dangerous, was set to be pulled aside for questioning at JFK airport but he slipped through undetected because someone had misspelled his last name in a security database. NBC News reports.

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When most people write about grammar (especially when they’re listing or testing for “grammatical errors”), are they really talking about grammar — or something else? Rob Reinalda sets us straight on Huffington Post. Thank you, Rob; I’m so glad someone finally wrote this important article.

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Deaf dogs are learning sign language in Nebraska, according to Nebraska.tv.

In Italy, where its inhabitants’ characteristic hand gestures and physical gesticulations are almost as important as the language itself — to the extent that they have their own dictionary and every Italian understands their meanings, the local sign language for the deaf isn’t legally recognized. The BBC reports on this strange anomaly.

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Anglophenia gives us five tiny U.S. phrases with opposite meanings in the UK. Like table, and bills …

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Weird word of the week: galimatias. n. nonsense; gibberish; confusing or meaningless talk.

“Easy at first, the language of friendship
Is, as we soon discover,
Very difficult to speak well, a tongue
With no cognates, no resemblance
To the galimatias of nursery and bedroom,
Court rhyme or shepherd’s prose,”

— from W. H. Auden’s For Friends Only

Celebrating the rule of three on Glosso’s 3rd birthday

Today is Glossophilia’s third birthday, and to celebrate, we’re taking a gander at the “rule of three” and its important place in the worlds of writing and storytelling. (Here’s a funny little fact: this is Glossophilia’s 333rd post. And thank you to those who come here often and who keep me supplied with tips and ideas: keep ’em coming!)

The rule of three principle states that anything offered in a package of three is inherently funnier, more satisfying, more memorable, more intuitive, or more effective than something that comes in twos, fours or some other number. There’s a Latin phrase, “omne trium perfectum”, that means, literally, “everything that comes in threes is perfect.” And so it often is when it comes to creative writing and prose: we see it in storytelling, comedy, speech-writing and advertising slogans.

What is the magic of three? Continue reading →

In the news (March 21)

Only one news item makes the TGIF cut this week. And the weird word of the week is facinorous: see below for its definition.

A big piece of news this week – so big that it has its very own TGIF post: AP has decided to remove the distinction between over and more than. As Poynter reports, “AP Stylebook editors said at a session Thursday that “over” is fine when referring to a quantity; you don’t have to change it to “more than.” The news elicited a gasp …”

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Facinorous: adjective meaning atrociously wicked, detestably bad. From the Latin facinora.

The language of death and dying

I’ve recently marked an anniversary of my beloved partner’s untimely death, and a new musical work addressing the subject of dying is preoccupying my professional mind. We find it hard to talk about death. Even in our commonly unfiltered world in which our every thought and observation is broadcast widely and uncensored, the subject of death and dying is one of our last lingering taboos — or at the very least an area of verbal discomfort. There are worldwide historical taboos banning the utterance of a deceased person’s name; Freud argued that such taboos stem from the fear of the presence or of the return of the dead person’s ghost. Many of us find it hard to express our condolences to the recently bereaved, or even simply to report on a person’s death: we struggle emotionally, empathically and linguistically to find the right words. And so the verb “to die” — so stark in its definitive and final form, and yet so direct and honest in its simplicity — is often and increasingly replaced by words and sayings that soften the idea of this fearful human fate that befalls us all. Apparently more pronounced among American rather than British English speakers is a growing tendency to reach for expressions such as “passed away”, “passed on”, or simply “passed” to articulate the fact that their loved ones have made their final journeys; for many, the verb “to die” is either too harsh or fails to embrace the notion of life enduring, religiously or spiritually, beyond the grave. But there are also many who prefer to address the ultimate human act of submission using the three-letter word that best describes it, honestly and unambiguously. Continue reading →

Music When Soft Voices Die

Music When Soft Voices Die (To –)

Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory—
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the belovèd’s bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

For David.

In the news (March 14)

TGIF: That Gerund Is Funky … Words and language in the news this week include a hilarious video about foreign language pronunciation, angst in Germany over an unusual invasion, a slip-up in the supermarket, an interview with Julian Barnes, and an embarrassing spelling mistake.

And find out below the definition of this week’s weird word of the week: engastrimyth … Continue reading →

Boyfriend: the Peter Pan of maleness

“If I was* your boyfriend, never let you go
Keep you on my arm girl, you’d never be alone
I can be a gentleman, anything you want
If I was your boyfriend, I’d never let you go, I’d never let you go”
— Justin Bieber, “Boyfriend” chorus

Although I’m not so sure he’ll ever become a gentleman, as he promises he can, Justin will be able to sing his refrain well into his dotage (assuming he still has the voice and the life to do so). And that’s because he can be your boyfriend at any age — whether he’s 16 or 106. Why is it that we ladies (or indeed gents) of a certain age still have so-called “boyfriends” and not “manfriends” or more age-appropriately-named suitors? Continue reading →