TGIF: That Gerund Is Funky (4 Oct)

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Welcome to “TGIF: That Gerund Is Funky”, a new weekly feature on Glossophilia. Every Friday, you’ll find a digest of some of the week’s best offerings about language, literature, grammar, usage and abusage — on the web and on the wire. Some of it will make you laugh, some might make you cry. Some will be genuinely useful, a lot of it won’t, and there will be stuff you just won’t believe. Enjoy (it).

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On Facebook, Grammarly posted some incorrect word definitions offered by creative and lateral-thinking students. One of my favorites is Adamant: “pertaining to original sin” …

The Guardian reassured us that there are 10 grammar rules we no longer need to worry about. And one of those is starting sentences with a conjunction; another is all about what you should and shouldn’t end them with.

You think “OMG” or “srsly” are 21st-century inventions? You might have to think again, as Jen Doll, in The Atlantic‘s October issue, takes a look at the not-so-recent history of today’s hottest expressions (not yet online).

The Associated Press reported on the rise in heritage language programs — and why the need for them has grown. “Dorothy Villarreal grew up dreaming in Spanish, first in Mexico and later in South Texas, where her family moved when she was six. She excelled in school — in English. But at home life was in Spanish, from the long afternoon chats with her grandparents to the Spanish-language version of Barbie magazines she eagerly awaited each month. She figured she was fluent in both languages. Then the Harvard University junior spent last summer studying in Mexico and realized just how big the gaps in her Spanish were.”

Pride’s Purge offered us a very useful document: a pocket guide to Toryspeak – ie. what Tories (aka members of the British Conservative Party) say vs. what Tories mean. When they say they’re reforming the NHS, what do they REALLY mean? And what does everyone understand by it?

Keith Houston gives us a sneak peek [see Stealth Mountain below] of his new book, Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks, when he describes “four scandalously overlooked typographic outliers” in the Financial Times.

You might not want to try singing like David Bowie – but now you can read like him. As part of the exhibition “David Bowie Is”, which recently opened at the Art Gallery of Toronto, a list of the legendary singer’s top 100 books has been compiled. Open Book Toronto has the list.

The writer Margaret Atwood is among a group of prominent Canadian women who have launched a campaign to make the English-language lyrics to Canada’s national anthem more gender-neutral, as the BBC reports.

Oliver Moody wrote in The Times (UK) that “many teachers do not have adequate knowledge of English grammar to teach the new curriculum, according to the architect of a government-funded teaching programme. Bas Aarts, a professor of English linguistics at University College London, … said that the English tests for pupils up to the age of 14 introduced by Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, demanded more knowledge of grammar than many teachers possess.”

mental_floss brought us 9 colorful words and phrases from Breaking Bad‘s final season. (Here’s what I learned: The next time someone offers to send you on a trip to Belize, run in the other direction. Fast.)

On The Guardian‘s U.S. comment site, self-confessed accent geek Erica Buist asks whether Britain is becoming a nation of accent snobs. If we Brits don’t take the trouble to pronounce foreign words like bruschetta correctly, do we have the right to judge those who communicate less comfortably in English?

If you read literary fiction, you’ll become more empathic. That’s what a new scientific study shows, according to a New York Times science blog post. Apparently “reading literary fiction – as opposed to popular fiction or serious nonfiction – leads people to perform better on tests that measure empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence.” Um – do we really need scientists to tell us that? I hear a big resounding ‘duh!’ echoing through the chattering book groups of the world …

And finally, I think I’ve found my favorite Tweeter. Here is how Stealth Mountain @stealthmountain advertises his or her mission: “I alert twitter users that they typed sneak peak when they meant sneak peek. I live a sad life.” The replies to Stealth’s tweets are even funnier than the tweets themselves. Thanks to Reddit for the tip-off.

Prince Charles reads Dylan Thomas on National Poetry Day (UK)

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To mark the occasion of National Poetry Day in Great Britain, Prince Charles has recorded himself reading one of his favorite poems: Fern Hill, by Dylan Thomas. It is appropriate that the Prince of Wales should have chosen a piece in which the Welsh poet reminiscences about his childhood visits to an aunt’s farm in Carmarthenshire.

You can hear Prince Charles’s recording at the BBC’s web site.

Fern Hill

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and
cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was
air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the
nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking
warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace.

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would
take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

— Dylan Thomas

Here are some other poems that have been featured recently on Glossophilia:

I Hear America Singing — by Walt Whitman

Blackberry Picking — by Seamus Heaney

The Throne — by Carol Ann Duffy

Mother of Beauty — by Flo Wen

New Year on Dartmoor — by Sylvia Plath

New Year’s Eve — by Thomas Hardy

 

The best grammar and English usage books: praise from high places

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I’m a big fan of these books about English usage and grammar. And I’m in good company: each book has enjoyed its own celebrity or high-profile endorsements — some surprising, and some surprisingly witty, given the subject matter of the texts. But even the best linguists can’t please everyone, and a couple of critics were happy to prove this point too …

H. W. Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage:

“Why must you write intensive here? Intense is the right word. You should read Fowler’s Modern English Usage on the use of the two words.'” — Winston Churchill, in a letter to the Director of Military Intelligence about the plans for the invasion of Normandy

“Reading Fowler provides instruction and knowledge and direction, but the whole of it is a sensual delight.” — William F. Buckley

“[Fowler] has afforded me endless amusement and instruction through my very long life.” — Jessica Mitford

Strunk and White: The Elements of Style

“If someone wants to toss it in the box with me when I go six feet under, that would be fine; it might actually assure my passage through the Pearly Gates, since Saint Peter no doubt is a gentleman of impeccable grammatical taste, not to mention style.” — Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post‘s book critic

“An aging zombie of a book . . . a hodgepodge, its now-antiquated pet peeves jostling for space with 1970s taboos and 1990s computer advice.” — Boston Globe, reviewing The Elements of Style Illustrated in 2005

Paul Brians: Common Errors in English Usage

“Let’s just say that Common Errors in English Usage is the most cheerfully useful book I’ve read since the Kama Sutra.” — Scott Simon, host of NPR’s Weekend Edition

Bryan Garner: Garner’s Modern American Usage

Garrison Keillor has called it one of the five most influential books in his library.

Mark Davidson: Right, Wrong, and Risky

“When I was nineteen I traveled by bus to New York with a copy of Roget’s Thesaurus on my lap, educating and delighting myself along the way. Now with Mark Davidson’s wonderful Right, Wrong, and Risky, I long for a similar trip in which to instruct my mind and free my spirit.” — Ray Bradbury

Lynne Truss: Eats, Shoots & Leaves

“If Lynne Truss were Roman Catholic I’d nominate her for sainthood.” — Frank McCourt, author of Angela’s Ashes

“Of course, I knew how it would appear to other people. ‘At the age of 48, she wrote a book on punctuation.’ If you were to read that thumbnail sketch in a novel, you would know everything you needed to know about this character’s tragic lack of ambition (and ignorance of the book trade).” — Lynne Truss, on writing her own runaway bestseller

“An Englishwoman lecturing Americans on semicolons is a little like an American lecturing the French on sauces. Some of Truss’s departures from punctuation norms are just British laxness.” — Louis Menand, New Yorker

Whatabouts and whataboutery

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Funny that Microsoft puts a red squiggly line under whatabouts, which is actually a real word — at least according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Meaning “one’s activities, what one is about”, it’s admittedly rare; it dates from the mid-19th century when it was coined as a take on the more understandable whereabouts, which is in frequent usage to this day. In the same way that whereabouts has a certain useful vagueness about it — emphasizing the approximation of whoever’s location is at issue, rather than pinpointing it with any sort of precision, there’s a certain muddiness about whatabouts that makes it especially useful and synonymless: someone’s whatabouts are certainly more poetic than their activities, what they do for a living, or “what they’re about” (in itself a peculiarly British expression).

Whataboutery doesn’t get an OED entry, but it’s another fabulously useful word that — like its cousin whatabouts — has no real synonym, and carries such heft in its meaning. According to Wiktionary, it means “protesting at hypocrisy; responding to criticism by accusing one’s opponent of similar or worse faults”. Even though this word evolved as a response to commentary on and discussions about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and that’s where most citations will be found, it continues to be used — although infrequently — to describe the nature of a certain type of argument. Ben S. Cohen wrote in the Huffington Post in 2010 about the ubiquity of whataboutery in political discourse, describing it as “a fairly transparent argumentative technique, designed to derail debate of one issue by raising another”. But how did this curious word find its way into our vocabulary?

World Wide Words explains: “It’s associated particularly with the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Bitter arguments by one side about terrorism were often countered, not by reasoned argument, but by accusations of similar atrocities by the other. In 2000, The Scotsman attributed the coinage to the former West Belfast MP Gerry Fitt, and gave this example: “Aye, the IRA might be bad, but what about …”. That makes clear it’s what about turned into a noun. The Belfast Telegraph used it on 29 September: “Both sides are steeped in historical ‘whataboutery’ and they cannot see the historical woods for the modern trees.”

Glossophilia & glossophobia: no, they’re not the same (or the opposite, for that matter)

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A new TV ad  (for Google’s Nexus 7 tablet) opens with a young voice asking: “What is glossophobia“? And then we watch and find out — while following the ad’s nervous teenager about to give a speech — exactly what this colorful word means, as we also find out about Google’s new product.

Glossophobia means speech anxiety, or the fear of public speaking. It comes from the Greek word glōssa, meaning “tongue”, and φόβος (phobos), meaning “fear” or “dread”.

Glossophilia doesn’t mean the opposite of glossophobia, as we might logically assume it does (with “-philia”, meaning fondness or abnormal love, replacing “-phobia”). I’m a glossophile, but I’m also glossophobic. Glossophilia means a love of language, whether foreign or native. Glossophiles are people with a deep and passionate love of language and the structure of language, and they are often involved in the study of literary terminology as well as grammar, punctuation, and language structure and usage. But there’s nothing stopping them from being glossophobes too…

 

 

Compared to, or compared with?

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The wonderful Maltese tenor Joseph Calleja is appearing as Caruso in a new movie starring Marion Cotillard and Joachuin Phoenix (The Immigrant will be shown at the New York Film Festival in October), and he’s absolutely the right person to do so: his voice harkens back to the Golden Age of singing — and no-one else today comes close, as so many music critics and fans have been quick to point out. But the question I have is this: should his voice be compared to or with those of the legendary singers of the past, such as Björling, Gigli and others? Strangely, one preposition emphasizes the similarities between the items being compared, and one highlights the differences.

Strunk and White, in The Elements of Style, compare the prepositions with one another:

“To compare to is to point out or imply resemblances between objects regarded as essentially of a different order; to compare with is mainly to point out differences between objects regarded as essentially of the same order. Thus, life has been compared to a pilgrimage, to a drama, to a battle; Congress may be compared  with the British Parliament. Paris has been compared to ancient Athens; it may be compared with modern London.”

Although Calleja’s voice is essentially of the same order as the great singers of the past to whom he’s often likened, and therefore a comparison — by Strunk and White’s logic — should fall into the latter “with” category, the resemblance is striking enough that “to” should probably be the chosen preposition. As Paris is compared to ancient Athens, so should the Maltese tenor be compared to the legendary Golden Age singers, the most famous one of whom he now portrays on the silver screen.

Instructions for American servicemen in Britain in 1942

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In 1942, the United States War Department distributed pamphlets to American servicemen heading over to Britain to help fight the war. The aim of the publication was to prepare the young GIs for life in a foreign culture (many of the young soldiers had never been abroad before) and to try and prevent any tensions or misunderstandings between the servicemen and the locals among whom they would be living and working. As explained to the GIs in the introduction to the War Department “instructions”: “In getting along, the first important thing to remember is that the British are like the Americans in many ways —  but not in all ways. You will quickly discover differences that seem confusing and even wrong. Like driving on the left side of the road, and having money based on an “impossible” accounting system, and drinking warm beer. But once you get used to things like that, you will realize that they belong to England just as baseball and jazz and coca-cola belong to us.”

The Times wrote an editorial about the pamphlet on July 14 of that year, predicting that it would be a bestseller and comparing it with the works of Irving, Emerson and Hawthorne (who had all tried to capture the essence of Britishness for American readers), saying that “none of their august expositions has the spotlight directness of this revelation of plain common horse sense understanding of evident truths”.

Here are some of the GI handbook’s observations about British English and the quirky word usage that the young American soldiers were warned to watch out for.

“The British have phrases and colloquialisms of their own that may sound funny to you. You can make just as many boners in their eyes. It isn’t a good idea, for instance, to say “bloody” in mixed company in Britain — it is one of their worst swear words. To say “I look like a bum ” is offensive to their ears, for to the British this means that you look like your own backside it isn’t important — just a tip if you are trying to shine in polite society. ”

…

“Almost before you meet the people you will hear them speaking “English”. At first you may not understand what they’re talking about and they may not understand what you say. The accent will be different from what you are used to, and many of the words will be strange, or apparently wrongly used.”

…

“In England the “upper crust” speak pretty much alike. You will hear the news broadcaster for the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation). He is a good example, because he has been trained to talk with the “cultured” accent. He will drop the  letter “r” (as people do in sections of our own country) and will say “hyah” instead of “here”.  He will use the broad a pronouncing all the a’s in “Banana” like the a in “father”. However funny you may think this is, you will be able to understand people who talk this way and they will be able to understand you. And you will soon get over thinking it is funny.”

…

“Instead of railroads, automobiles and radios, the British will talk about railways, motorcars and wireless sets. A railroad tie is a sleeper. … A man who works on the roadbed is a navvy. … The top of a car is the hood. What we call the hood (of the engine) is the bonnet. … Gas is petrol — if there is any.”

“You will have to ask for sock suspenders to get garters, and for braces instead of suspenders — if you need any. If you are standing in line to buy (book) a railroad ticket or a seat at the movies (cinema), you will be queuing (pronounced “cueing”) up before the booking office. If you want a beer quickly, you had better ask for the nearest pub.”

And finally, here were some important do’s and don’ts for the GIs heading off to a foreign land to face a common foe:

“Don’t make fun of British speech or accents. You sound just as funny to them, but they will be too polite to show it. … NEVER criticize the King or Queen. … You will soon find yourself among a kindly, quiet, hard-working people who have been living under a strain such as few people in the world have ever known. In your dealings with them, let this be your slogan: “It is always impolite to criticize your hosts; it is militarily stupid to criticize your allies.”

“You won’t be able to tell the British much about “taking it”. They are not particularly interested in taking it any more. They are far more interested in getting together in solid friendship with us, so that we can all start dishing it out to Hitler.”

A reproduction of the original pamphlet,  Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain 1942, was published by the Bodleian Library in Oxford, which holds a copy of the original typescript issued by the War Department in Washington DC. Other than the important language usage excerpts above, the book contains similarly enlightening sections with titles such as “British reserved, not unfriendly”, “The British are tough”, “Keep out of arguments”, and “indoor amusements” — which is essentially a paragraph all about the great British pub…

Patriot Day

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Today is Patriot Day. It is an occasion observed annually on September 11 to remember the nearly 3000 people who died during terrorist attacks in New York, Washington DC and Shanksville, PA in the U.S. on that day in 2001. Many Americans call Patriot Day either “9/11” or “September 11”.

On the direction of the President, the U.S. flag is displayed on the homes of Americans, the White House and U.S. government buildings throughout the world. The flag is flown at half-mast. A moment of silence is often observed at 8:46 AM (EDT),  marking the time that the first plane flew into the World Trade Center. Special services or prayer meetings are held, especially in areas particularly affected by the events of the fateful day. Many lay flowers or visit memorials.

Patriot Day shouldn’t be confused with Patriot’s Day (or Patriots’ Day), which commemorates the battles of Lexington and Concord, two of the earliest battles in the American Revolutionary War, which were fought near Boston in 1775. Patriot’s Day falls on the third Monday of April (in 2014 it will be on April 21).

Nylon: the fabric of two cities, or an acronym?

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Nylon was invented in the mid-1930s by Wallace Carothers, the director of DuPont’s research center. The synthetic fiber comprising three basic ingredients was called “Nylon 66” by the chemists who brought it into the world because two of its components — adipic acid and hexamethylene diamine — each contain 6 carbon atoms per molecule. However, Carothers named it simply “nylon”, and that was the name by which it was patented in 1935. The durable fabric was fantastically successful when it started being sold soon afterwards, in 1939, most usefully and famously as a replacement for silk in hosiery. Nylon stockings were introduced that year at New York’s World Fair, and by the following year the plural of the word, “nylons”, was synonymous with women’s stockings. The versatile fiber/fabric was used to make everything from toothbrush bristles, fishing lines and surgical sutures to parachutes during the second world war, and later seatbelts and tents. It’s now the second most used synthetic fiber in the U.S.

But why “nylon”? There are two spurious theories about how it got its name. First: it’s been suggested that New York’s initials (NY) and the first three letters of London were behind the famous fabric, representing the two cities where the product started its life. However, London wasn’t involved in any way with the launch of nylon: that all happened on the other side of the Atlantic …

The other more outlandish theory is that it was an acronym for “Now You’ve Lost, Old Nippon” (or, alternatively, “Now You Look Out, Nippon”), supposedly referring to Japan’s apparent loss of the U.S. market for its silk exports as a result of this new synthetic product.

Neither of these suggestions holds water, and nylon’s real etymology is disappointingly more prosaic. As Wikipedia explains succinctly, “in 1940, John W. Eckelberry of DuPont stated that the letters “nyl” were arbitrary and the “on” was copied from the suffixes of other fibers such as cotton and rayon. A later publication by DuPont (Context, vol. 7, no. 2, 1978) explained that the name was originally intended to be “No-Run” (“run” meaning “unravel”), but was modified to avoid making such an unjustified claim. Since the product was not really run-proof, the vowels were swapped to produce “nuron”, which was changed to “nilon” “to make it sound less like a nerve tonic”. For clarity in pronunciation, the “i” was changed to “y”.”