Today is International Apostrophe Day!
As Sam Tanner tweeted earlier this morning: “An apostrophe is the difference between a business that knows its shit and a business that knows it’s shit.”
Here’s a round-up of apostrophe news and celebrations on its auspicious day. (This particular awareness day was conceived last year by The Guardian‘s production editor, David Marsh.) Continue reading
Posh Spice and husband looking vaguely chuffed
Yanks just don’t say these words (at least not with these particular meanings). But they also just don’t have anything of their own — at least not one particular gobsmacking word — that comes even close to each of these fine British colloquialisms. Knock yourself out with these conkers.
Chuffed: bloody pleased with yourself. “I just beat him at squash! Yeah – I’m chuffed mate.”
Posh: toffee-nosed, upper-crust, and probably bloody loaded. “He’s going to Ascot. Posh git.”
Knackered: bloody exhausted. “I just walked home from the pub. I’m bloody knackered.”
Naff: tacky, bloody tasteless. “Did you see her party get-up? How naff can you get?”
Whinge: complain in a really annoying and tiresome way. “Will you stop your bloody whinging and moaning and get a grip?”
Beaver (verb, usually followed by away): to work your bloody arse off. “While we were all down the pub, he was beavering away on his thesis. Bloody swat.”
Twee: too bloody quaint, pretty, or sentimental. “Lace and doilies on the tea trolley? How twee can you get?”
Bloody: very. Just a bloody good word for very.
The Knights — a young, energetic New York-based orchestra that’s taking the city and the world by storm (especially when it gives its summer concerts in Central Park’s Bandshell) — is something of a grammatical conundrum when it comes to conjugating verbs around it.
Had I begun that sentence without the clause identifying it as an orchestra — “The Knights is something of a grammatical conundrum” — it would have sounded, well, weird. And that’s because The Knights is an inherently plural name, at least linguistically: it is the name of a group of musicians who call themselves “The Knights” when they’re playing together as one ensemble, just as the famous four from Liverpool called themselves “Beatles”, and that other British band described their members together as “Rolling Stones”. Musically the groups are each a single entity and respectively a singular sensation (as Marvin Hamlisch wrote deliberately and ambiguously about his famous chorus line). But would you ever expect to hear the statement “The Beatles was a British pop band”? Probably not. Whereas Radiohead “is” likely to be talked about in singular form, as Paste magazine did just a couple of weeks back, when it wrote that “Radiohead has helped set the bar for what a music video can be”, and that “Radiohead is known for its animated and cinematic music videos”. And that’s because Radiohead doesn’t have an inherent plural in its name.
An earlier Glossophilia post looked at the conjugation of verbs for collective nouns, which can be singular or plural depending on a number of factors — including what side of the Atlantic you live on. Curiously, it’s very common for the Brits to give collective nouns and names — especially of bands and sports teams — plural verb forms, even when the name is definitively single. If you Google the words “Radiohead are”, your results will return mainly British writers and publications. A search on “Radiohead is” delivers comments on the band from the rest of the world.
But there’s something specific, and endlessly debatable, about groups, bands, teams, duos, troupes or ensembles of any kind that have plural nouns in their very names and how they should be treated linguistically, and this sets them aside from the rest of the collective noun debate. Not only is it grating on the ear to hear a collection of nouns with an ‘s’ acting as a single grammatical subject (“The Decemberists is coming soon”, “The Rockettes is on TV”), but it’s also at odds with what’s in our mind’s eye, which is a collection of people doing something together and not a single object or entity. Yet when the name is singular, our ears don’t have the same problem.
Colin and Eric Jacobsen, the brothers who founded The Knights, also make up half the personnel of the renowned string quartet Brooklyn Rider. It doesn’t sound odd when we hear that “Brooklyn Rider is all about the number four” (as NPR Music said in its review of the quartet’s CD Seven Steps), and yet when the New York Times sets the brothers’ other ensemble (the orchestra) up for comparison with others like it, the writer, Zachary Woolfe, is at pains to keep it plural as its name demands, despite his phrasing that starts out decidedly singular: “Is there another orchestra that seems to be having as much fun when it plays as The Knights do?”
Slightly off the subject, but relevant nonetheless, is an amusing lexical issue that a famous movie ran into during its theatrical pre-release. Before Alfred Hitchcock’s avian thriller of 1963 arrived in cinemas, the slogan for the movie’s ad campaign read: “The birds is coming!” I bet Hitchcock didn’t see that one coming …
Simon Cowell, on discovering recently that he’s going to be a daddy, is said by Britain’s Sunday Mirror to feel as though “he’s been done up like a kipper in all of this.” (The newspaper actually wrote that he “feels like he’s been done up like a kipper”, but that’s for another conversation.)
“Done [or stitched] up like a kipper”: now there’s a quaint British expression — meaning “fitted up or framed”, “used or betrayed” — that you probably won’t often hear on the other side of the Atlantic, which Mr. Cowell has a habit of crossing. No-one’s really sure where it originates from, and although there are several theories floating around about fish being cut, gutted and hung out to dry or smoke — which seem vaguely plausible — there is one suggestion by slang lexicographer Jonathon Green on Quora that doesn’t seem too fishy:
“Done up like a kipper dates back at least to the early 1980s. The general meaning is defeated, put at a total disadvantage, plus a specific sense of ‘caught red-handed’. Given the process of kippering herrings, it seems to be a play on gutted, i.e. deeply disappointed, sick and tired, fed up, utterly depressed, very upset. The slang use of kipper seems never to be positive, e.g. the post 1940s Australian definition of an English immigrant as a kipper: ‘they’re two-faced and got no guts’.”
Another fashionable theory is that it relates to a particular type and shape of tie popular in the 1960s: here’s how Phrase Finder explains it:
“In the 1960s, according to London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, the extra wide tie called the ‘kipper’ was in vogue. Kipper ties were introduced by the British fashion designer Michael Fish. The term ‘kipper’ was a pun on his last name ‘Fish.’ Another source ‘The A-Z of Food & Drink’ by noted lexicographer John Ayto says, in addition, that tie was also named partly for its shape (the kipper).”
Here are some other British phrases that might bemuse or bewilder in the U.S. (with links to sites that either explain or suggest their respective origins):
“All mouth and [no] trousers”: originating in northern England, the phrase is defined by Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Catchphrases American and British as “noisy and worthless stuff,” applied to “a loud-mouthed, blustering fellow”. The nearest modern phrase is probably “all talk and no action”. (Fraser’s Phrases)
“Bent as a nine bob note”: meaning dishonest or corrupt. There is and was no such thing as a nine-shilling note (bob is slang for shilling), so any such item would have to be counterfeit. (Phrase Finder)
“Bob’s your uncle”: meaning “And there you have it!”. (World Wide Words)
“Sweet Fanny Adams”: meaning basically nothing. This expression has a strangely tragic origin. It isn’t, as many believe, a polite euphemistic alternative to “f*** all and its initials, but actually dates back to a Victorian murder victim with this name, which the British Navy — so often at the heart of quirky British slang — hijacked and used to describe certain food items. (Fraser’s Phrases)
“To queer the pitch”: meaning to spoil the business at hand (see Glossophilia’s earlier post on the word queer and a history of this phrase)
“Picking up fag ends”: meaning to eavesdrop on or try and enter a conversation that is nearing its end. The “fag-end” was a term used to describe an end section of cloth or yarn in weaving (and is also an informal British term for cigarette butts).
“Give ’em what for”: meaning to punish, scold or reprimand someone; eg. from Rudyard Kipling’s “The Drums of the Fore and Aft” (a short story in Indian Tales in 1890): “‘Now,’ gasped Jakin, ‘I’ll give you what-for.’ He proceeded to pound the man’s features while Lew stamped on the outlying portions of his anatomy.” (Phrase Finder)
“Remember me to her/them”: meaning to pass on greetings in the form of a mention or reminder; eg. from Scarborough Fair, a traditional English ballad: “Remember me to one who lives there, / She once was a true love of mine.” (StackExchange)
On the 1 train, NYC. August 2, 2013.
Seen on NYC’s subway: B train, July 31, 2013.
Everyone agrees that the UK is moving steadily and healthily in the direction of a classless society, and it’s a little indelicate nowadays to try and identify anything overt that might hint at someone’s social class, whether it’s their clothes, accent, the names they give to meals (see Glossophilia’s earlier post on this subject), or which synonym they choose in certain given situations …
While researching the pronunciation of loan words for the previous post, I stumbled on something interesting: several sources point out how choosing a French derivative over a more historically English synonym was for a long time — and still can be — regarded as rather “non-U”. Living room is U, lounge (from the French) is non-U; napkin is U, serviette is non-U; sofa is U, settee is non-U; and two more amusing examples: what? is U, pardon? is non-U; lavatory or loo is U, toilet is so very non-U. Why this very predictable pattern? And what’s with this “U/non-U” business?
Wikipedia explains it clearly:
“U and non-U English usage, with “U” standing for “upper class”, and “non-U” representing the aspiring middle classes, was part of the terminology of popular discourse of social dialects (sociolects) in Britain and New England in the 1950s. The debate did not concern itself with the speech of the working classes, who in many instances used the same words as the upper classes. For this reason, the different vocabularies often can appear quite counter-intuitive: the middle classes prefer “fancy” or fashionable words, even neologisms and often euphemisms, in attempts to make themselves sound more refined, while the upper classes in many cases stick to the same plain and traditional words that the working classes also use, as, conscious of their status, they have no need to make themselves sound more refined.”
Taking this rule of thumb that the aspiring middle classes tend to prefer “fancy” or “fashionable” words, it makes sense that the apparently pretentious words of French origin would fall universally and predictably into the non-U category — hence those examples above.
The invention of the U/non-U dichotomy (which prescribed choices not just in language but also in behavior and general etiquette) is often attributed to the writer Nancy Mitford — one of the famous six sisters — who popularized the concept by including it in her books (notably her Noblesse Oblige, published in 1956). But it was actually a professor of linguistics at Birmingham University, Alan Ross, who first suggested the concept and coined the terms a couple of years earlier in his treatise “Upper-Class English Usage”. Here’s an excerpt from his paper that gives the gist of where he was going with his thesis:
“There are, it is true, still minor points of life which may serve to demarcate the upper class, but they are only minor ones. The games of real tennis and piquet, an aversion to high tea, having one’s cards engraved (not printed), not playing tennis in braces, and, in some cases, a dislike of certain comparatively modern inventions such as the telephone, the cinema, and the wireless, are still perhaps marks of the upper class. Again, when drunk, gentlemen often become amorous or maudlin or vomit in public, but they never become truculent. … I am concerned with the linguistic demarcation of the upper class.”
In his comprehensive survey of both pronunciation and vocabulary, he goes on to give special emphasis and importance to one of the French/non-U examples cited above: “Non-U serviette / U table-napkin; perhaps the best known of all the linguistic class-indicators of English.” You can read more excerpts from Ross’s often hilarious paper in an article published in The Independent in 1994.
Does the U and non-U bible of Mitford’s time still carry any weight today? At least in the decreasingly class-conscious Great Britain? It seems to in some circles, according to Debrett’s online in its “Everyday Etiquette” section, which advertises itself thus: “From rites of passage, family occasions, work life and romance to table manners, letter writing, body language and mobile etiquette, this is Debrett’s definitive online guide to modern manners.” More specifically, it addresses the U and non-U question in its British Behaviour section, which is billed as Debrett’s “indispensable Guide to British life and manners… From Countryside Rules, Dress Codes, Kilts, Meeting Royalty and Port Etiquette to Apologising, Introductions, Queuing, Reticence, Small Talk and Understatment. British rituals, social occasions, manners and characteristics decoded…”.
Here’s what Debrett’s concludes about Ross’s and Mitford’s rules, which today seem outlandish to most of us:
“Today, some of her proscriptions seem bizarre (spectacles, not glasses; looking glass, not mirror). Language is ever-evolving and society is visibly relaxing – a preoccupation with the minute calibrations of social class is looking increasingly outmoded. … However, if you are anxious to pass muster in more class-aware environments you should remember the basics: loo or lavatory never toilet; sofa never settee; napkin never serviette; supper never tea; drawing room or sitting room, never lounge or front room.”
There’s even a “U or non-U” personality test on the popular online dating site OKCupid. (Google it: I’m not joking.) Whether anyone gives weight to that particular linguistic parameter when choosing their romantic mate is anyone’s guess …
I stumbled on something interesting in the Oxford English Dictionary. It contradicts itself on the subject of which and that, using the relative pronoun which in a definition for which it (the OED) — in its own definitions of which and that — prescribes that. This seems to be symptomatic of a larger ongoing debate about the two relative pronouns that divides not just individual grammar commentators (both lay and professional) but also, apparently, two nations.
First, here’s a brief primer on the original (but now sometimes disputed or diluted) difference between which and that. According to the dictionary mentioned above — specifically the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (the 1993 edition): which (when used as a relative pronoun) is defined as “introducing a clause describing or stating something additional about the antecedent, the sense of the main clause being complete without the relative clause.” The same dictionary gives the relative pronoun that a different role in the sentence, “introducing a clause defining or restricting the antecedent, especially a clause essential to the identification of the antecedent (and thus completing its sense).”
An earlier Glossophilia post explains and illustrates this difference a little more simply: “‘That’ … qualifies or identifies the noun preceding it, pinpointing which one of two or more nouns is being referred to. ‘Which’ … simply adds extra but non-identifying information about the preceding noun. A good rule of thumb is this: if the that/which clause can be taken away and you still understand the reference, it must be a which. If you take it away and you’re unsure about what is being referenced, it must be a that.” (See the earlier post for examples.)
Now let’s go to the iffy definition in question: here is the noun prequel defined by the NSOED quoted above:
“A book, film, etc., portraying events which precede those of an existing work.”
According to its own definition of which, the “which clause” presented here about prequel (“which precede those of an existing work”) should be additional to the main clause (“a book, film, etc., portraying events”) and the sense of that main clause should be complete without it. So, technically, “a book, film, etc., portraying events” should stand alone as a complete and understandable clause in its own right. Hmmm … I don’t think so. That second clause is absolutely necessary to complete the definition, and therefore should be started by the word that, which (according to the OED, as noted above) introduces a clause “essential to the identification of the antecedent (and thus completing its sense)”. The definition should therefore read: “A book, film, etc., portraying events that precede those of an existing work.” At least that’s as prescribed by the historical/original respective uses of which and that, which have in the last century become rather murky — especially on the eastern side of the Atlantic.
I have noticed especially in recent years that the British (but not the Americans — at least not to the same extent) have shown a tendency to substitute that with which, as the OED has done in the prequel definition above. And almost as if to justify the switch (or what some might regard as the error), they remove the comma that normally precedes which in its traditional role as a non-identifying pronoun. Curiously it’s never done the other way around: ie. that is never used instead of which. Let’s look at the following examples:
“I gave him the red coat, which my mother had worn earlier.” Here, the which clause is not defining, and the main clause is therefore complete in itself: “I gave him the red coat.”
“I gave him the coat that suited him best.” The that clause is defining (ie. it is identifying the coat in question), so the clause is essential for the sentence to make sense; without the that clause, it wouldn’t be clear which coat is being referred to.
Now the Brits might well write: “I gave him the coat which suited him best.” They are using which instead of that to start the defining clause (“which suited him best”) and removing the comma before it to make the substitution easier on the ear. But they would be unlikely to write: “I gave him the red coat, that my mother had worn earlier.”
This interchangeability or substitution is heard much less frequently on American shores, where that and which tend to retain their traditional respective identifying and non-identifying roles.
My father, Brian Barder (a staunch Brit linguistically as well as in other ways), argues that both Robert Burchfield and Roger Fowler, two of the world’s most respected authorities on language usage, were tolerant of and relaxed about what and that being interchangeable, with both of them noting that some of the best writers tend to disregard any historical difference between the relative pronouns. Here is what Barder explains:
“Burchfield/Fowler (MEU 3rd ed.) in section 3 of the that entry says that most of the time which and that are interchangeable without any “offence to any rule of syntax”, and quotes the original Fowler as ‘wisely’ observing in 1926 that ‘if writers would agree to regard that as the defining relative pronoun and which as the non-defining, there would be much gain in lucidity and in ease. Some there are who follow this principle now; but it would be idle to pretend that it is the practice either of most or of the best writers.’
“I am pretty sure that the distinction has been much further eroded since 1926.
“Burchfield continues with a longish piece about additional complications when either relative pronoun is preceded by a comma, the fact that that can’t idiomatically be preceded by a preposition whereas which can, that that has no possessive form (unlike which), circs in which that is leading a defining clause can often be omitted and understood, but not when it leads a non-defining clause … and more. It’s on p 774 of my edition.”
But I think it’s safe to argue that Americans are just different from the British on this particular issue of tolerance and acceptability. Curiously, in this case it’s the Americans who are being the traditionalists — when it’s so often the other way round. It’s also a clear indication to me that I’ve truly joined the ranks of the Americans, at least on this one usage issue.
I read somewhere recently (but can’t remember where) that one of the most common areas of complaint directed towards the BBC from viewers and listeners around the world is not what you might think it might be. It’s not claims of bias or prejudice, inaccuracy, prurience or falsehood that have people shaking their fists: it’s the far more serious crime of mispronunciation that has people raising their voices in anger — whether the word in question comes out sounding sloppy or just plain wrong. And I’m sure these complaints are the bane of many radio hosts’ professional lives.
Don’t blame the radio guy. There are many everyday words whose pronunciations are almost universally incorrect – or at least sloppy – simply because of the spelling and construction of the words themselves. It often boils down to too many voiced consonants being near or next door to each other in the word, making it difficult for the mouth, tongue, lips and soft palate to wrap themselves around the complex sounds and resulting in lazy annunciation. A second “r” that follows too soon after the first is a good example of this: February more often than not comes out as “Feb-ry” or “Feb-you-ary”; surprise as “suh-prise”; berserk as “buh-serk”; governor as “guv-uh-ner” or “guv-ner”; and library as “libe-ry” or “libe-ery”. Other common consonant clashes that twist the tongue (especially in the middle of words or after particular vowel sounds) are “cl”, “ct”, “dn”, “sthm”, “sk”, “lfth”, and “gn”: see some examples of these below.
nuclear comes out as nyu-cue-ler (well, if you’re George Bush it does)
Antarctic — as Ant-ar-tic
Wednesday — as Wens-day
asthmatic — as as-ma-tic
twelfths — as twelths
recognize — as re-co-nize
ask — as ax
asterisk — as as-ter-ix
But sometimes it’s about more than just lingual laziness. There are several words that are commonly mispronounced because the word simply doesn’t look like the way it should be pronounced, especially when its spelling points the reader towards a more obvious or regular pattern of pronunciation. This is sometimes the case with words that are more often seen in print than heard spoken aloud; highly literate and educated people can go whole lifetimes before realizing that the slightly obscure word they’ve been reading on the page (and imagined articulated a certain way) is actually the same as another unusual word they’ve heard pronounced differently. See if you’re surprised by any of these commonly mispronounced gems:
Hyperbole — often mispronounced “HYper-bowl” — is actually “hy-PER-bol-lee”
Segue — not “seeg” but ‘SEG-way”
Victuals — not “VICK-chewals” but “VITT-uhls”
Epitome — not “EPI-tome” but “eh-PITT-uh-mee”
Omnipotent — not “OM-ni-poh-tent” but “om-NIP-oh-tent”
Superfluous — not “SOUP-er-floo-us” but “soup-ER-floo-us”
Here are a couple of words that seem to have a strange but common American pronunciation — at least they do to my British ear:
mischievous — pronounced with four syllables: “mis-CHEE-vee-us”. Where did that extra “vee” syllable come from?
pianist — pronounced with just two syllables: “PEEN-ist”. A bit too close to another word for comfort; where did that third syllable, that includes the ‘a’, disappear to?
The next post will be about differences between American and British pronunciations of foreign loan words. You say ‘erb and I say herb: Let’s call the thing off…
In the first of three posts about tricky pronunciations, let’s look at some proper nouns — mainly of the English or British variety — that don’t sound quite the way they look.
Names of titles:
Boatswain — pronounced BOH-sun
Colonel — KER-nel
Lieutenant — Lef-TEN-ant
Viscount – VIE-count
Names of places (in the UK):
Beauchamp — Beechum
Bicester — Bisster
Blenheim — Blennum
Gloucester — Glosster
Greenwich — Grennitch
Leicester — Lester
Leominster — Lemster
Magdalen — Maudlin
Warwick — Worrick
Worcester — Wooster
Weymiss — Weemz
Surnames:
Cholmondeley — Chumley
Featherstonehaugh — Fanshaw
Mainwaring — Mannering
Marjoribanks — Marchbanks
First names:
Aoife (Irish) — EE-fa
Naomh (Irish) — Neeve
Siobhan (Irish) — Shuh-VAUN
Saoirse (Irish) — SEER-shuh
St John (first name or surname) — SIN-juhn
And here are some weird American place names thrown in for good measure:
Arkansas — AHR-can-saw
Boise, ID — BOY-zee
Cairo, IL — KAY-row (not KIE-row)
Leominster, MA — Le-MON-ster
Ojai, CA — OH-high
Versailles, KY — Vair-SAILS (not Vair-SIGH)
Here’s what the English pamphleteer, farmer and journalist William Cobbett wrote about pronunciation in his grammar treatise of 1818: “Pronunciation is learned as birds learn to chirp and sing. In some counties of England many words are pronounced in a manner different from that in which they are pronounced in other counties; and, between the pronunciation of Scotland and that of Hampshire the difference is very great indeed. But, while all inquiries into the causes of these differences are useless, and all attempts to remove them are vain, the differences are of very little real consequence. For instance, though the Scotch say coorn, the Londoners cawn, and the Hampshire folks carn, we know they all mean to say corn. Children will pronounce as their fathers and mothers pronounce; and if, in common conversation, or in speeches, the matter be good and judiciously arranged, the facts clearly stated, the arguments conclusive, the words well chosen and properly placed, hearers whose approbation is worth having will pay very little attention to the accent. In short, it is sense, and not sound, which is the object of your pursuit.”
— William Cobbett, A Grammar of the English Language in a Series of Letters: Intended for the Use of Schools and of Young Persons in General, but More Especially for the Use of Soldiers, Sailors, Apprentices, and Plough-Boys, 1818