Langwich

Infallibility

2011-09-13T09:58:00.000-07:00

I'm an English teacher. I admit it freely. It's a better occupation than being, say, a drug dealer, but not nearly as much fun.
The problem is that people tend to think that I am the final authority on all things having to do with grammar and language. I get friends who phone me for advice. Sometimes I have to tell them, "It really doesn't make much difference," or "We really don't know," or "since language changes, that's in flux." As an example of the last -- someone asked me recently about the differences between uninterested and disinterested. I replied that traditionally, uninterested meant "having no interest in," and disinterested meant "having no opinion on." I continued that disinterested is acquiring the meaning that was formerly given to uninterested. That is, the sentence, "Charlie was disinterested in the outcome," could mean "Charlie had no opinion about the outcome," or "Charlie didn't care about the outcome."
This elicited puzzled silence. How could it be, my caller asked, that things could change like that? Shouldn't language stay put? Isn't there a proper English somewhere that we can adhere to?
Well, possibly, but "proper" changes. At one time, mob wasn't proper. If I remember right, mob is short for a Latin phrase mobus vulgaris -- "the common people in motion."
We can wish all we want, but the fact is language is changing even as we talk about it.

Meaning is much more

2011-08-19T20:10:00.000-07:00

The meaning of a word is very often much more than what you'll learn if you use Webster as your source. Today, playing Scrabble with my sister, I used the word "braless," which you will note, has seven letters.

The dictionary defines braless as, "not wearing a bra."

Wait a minute, though. I'm not wearing a bra, but I wouldn't describe myself as braless. So, there has to be something more to it.

You'll have gotten it now: braless means "Not wearing a bra when it's normal that a person would be wearing one." And it's also clear that braless is a gender-specific word. It applies in all cases to women. There is an episode of Seinfeld in which Kramer invents a bra for men, but in order to specify what it is, he has to invent a name for it. He calls it the "bro." This underlines the fact that women wear bras; men don't.

There are a number of words that have this gender-specificity, though not often as strongly as with braless. The word "oaf," for instance, is always male. There aren't any female oafs. Same for "blockhead" and "dolt." On the other hand, "airhead" and "bubblehead" are female.

You can read into this what you want regarding female and male roles.

Is the game afoot

2011-08-14T19:48:00.001-07:00

A friend recently asked me about the term "afoot." His question was, "Could you say, 'I was on a horse and she was afoot'?" Please notice the very tricky punctuation and I think I got it right. Anyway, there were voices in the background and I could tell that a bet was on the line.

"Sure," I said. "It's kind of an old-fashioned word, and we'd probably say 'on foot' today."

After my friend hung up, I wondered what had occasioned the bet. Then I remembered a phrase attributed to Sherlock Holmes, but one he never actually uttered in one of Conan Doyle's stories. It's "The game is afoot."

A game walking? Of course not. In this case, the meaning of the word is "happening." Something is afoot.

So, what we have is a word with two meanings. Actually, it'd probably be more accurate to say that we have two different words which just happened to be spelled the same. The word "run" in "a run of good luck," is clearly connected to the original meaning of the word "run," and can be seen to be a metaphor. Sometimes, though, as with "afoot," the meanings have separated too far. Or, it might be the case that the two words "afoot" in fact come from different roots. I'll have to look that one up.

Comparitive and superlative

2010-08-09T03:34:00.001-07:00

One of the quirks of the English language that is dying out is the difference between the comparative and the superlative. Here's how the difference works: Suppose your significant other wants help in choosing a new pair of pants (note how gender neutral this all is?). Now, the SO shows you two pair and asks, "Which pair do you like most?"
That's "wrong" (please note quotation marks). It should be, "Which pair do you like more?"
When discussing two things, we use the comparative: more, better, bigger. It is only when we move to three or more things that we use the superlative: most, best, biggest. Suffice it to say that the usage is dying because it's not very useful.
Normally I can usually think of some historical reason why a really silly rule should be in place, but this one defies any explaining. There are a number of languages in the world that have a kind of three-tiered system for numbering things. It goes one, two, many, as if -- once we get beyond two -- it's just not worth it to be specific. I don't think that's the case here, but with language you never know.
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Evolution

2010-04-15T10:02:00.000-07:00

I was listening to an old recording of Maybelle Carter singing "Wildwood Flower," the other day, and she sang, "I woke from my dream and all idols was clay." What interests me was not the subject/verb agreement (this is Bluegrass, after all), but the "idols was clay." This is an evolution in language.
The original passage is from the Old Testament, and relates to a vision of a statue, and idol, with golden head, silver shoulders, and so on down the torso, until the feet, which were of clay. The vision typifies the "golden age" hypothesis, which states that things were better back then, and got worse as we neared the present, where things are miserable.
The meaning of the idol shifted somewhat through history, coming to mean, in the 20th century, that an idol had "feet of clay," meaning that an admired person had a serious flaw.
As Mother Maybelle sings it, the meaning has shifted again. Now it means that anything which we thought was good has gone bad.
This is the way language works. The shift is not good, not bad, just there.

Spell Check as the Curse of Humankind

2010-02-03T12:31:00.000-08:00

Here's a headline from the Money section of the Feb 3 Salt Lake Tribune. Bennett: Ruling won't give big business undo campaign sway.
Did you spot it? The word should be undue, or more than is appropriate. As it stands, the headline seems to say that business might have the power to dismantle campaigns. Well, maybe that's true too.
In this case, the culprit is spell check, which causes us to pay attention only to those words that have the little red squiggly line under them.
So, we need rules for using spell check. I know two:
1) Spell check doesn't cover all words; just the ones in the lexicon. So, unusual words or proper nouns are frequently underlined. The problem is that we often assume that a proper noun, say the name Noam Chomsky, though underlined, is spelled correctly. But all the spell check does is compare the spelling with words in its data banks. It will underline both Noam and Naom. The way to fix this is to put such words into the computer's lexicon and then any deviations will show up. If I put Noam in, then Noam will show up underlined in squiggly red.
2) Spell check won't find words that are correct but spellings different from the one you wanted to use. Undue/undo, and a host of others. Someone, a human preferably, needs to make sure that the computer hasn't missed anything.
Which in the case of today's Tribune, didn't happen.

El or La? Who decides?

2009-11-04T20:02:00.000-08:00

I am, for about the 20th time in my life, learning Spanish. I decided to go the vocabulary route this time and got myself a box of flash cards. One of the things I learned is that e-mail is el correro electronico. I've no problem with that, although I really should be shortened to el-C, maybe, in good old American tradition. This is obviously a new word, since e-mail isn't that old. It's masculine (el), I assume, because correro is masculine. So far, so good. But what happens if a noun comes into Spanish that isn't built on a previous noun. Let's say that a word has to be invented for something -- oh, I don't know -- a flist. Would it be el flisto or la flista? The chances are that the item, whatever it is, is neither male nor female, so the choice of grammatical gender is completely open.
I have two questions: First, who decides? Is there a committee set up somewhere that decides, for all Spanish-speaking peoples, what the gender of a noun will be? Second, what are the criteria? Does this committee sit around and debate the issue, with a round of balloting to see what's going to happen?
Here my American language chauvinism shows itself. English got rid of grammatical gender, by and large, 8 or 9 hundred years ago. It's about time Spanish did the same. Then I wouldn't have to learn all those el's and la's.

Language complexity

2009-08-11T19:16:00.001-07:00

Was talking to my friend Will Pitkin today about my theory on language complexity and streamlining. He suggested to me that in the beginning, about (whenever language began), people used language to name things in the here and now. "Man," "Woman," "Child," "Television." Scratch that last one. But, Will opined, when people started talking about groups or classes, then things got complex. One could not just say, "Man man man man," for the plural. Well, I guess they could, but when you had a large crowd, it'd get tiresome. So, what people needed was a name for the idea of men in general, and some way to differentiate it from the idea of a particular man. Hence markers, or inflections: Man, men. When we had to talk about something that belongs to man, we can simply stack words, (I believe the cargo cult has a name for their religion: "rot bilong cargo," the road that belongs to cargo), or we can add a marker that says, in effect, "of men." From then on, as concepts became more and more abstract, more ways of marking them came into being.
I still think the priests are in there somewhere.

Regularization

2009-08-06T13:28:00.000-07:00

I am puzzled by a tendency I see in language. It's kind of two pronged. The first prong is a slide toward making things regular. In English we see this in past tenses of verbs and in plurals of nouns. The past tense of bake was once boke. The plural of shoe was once shoon. Any new verb comes into English with a past tense that ends in -ed (snorf, snorfed), and any new noun comes in with a plural that ends in -s (glun, gluns). The second prong is a tendency to eliminate unnecessary or complex constructions. Hence the loss of any distinction between shall and will, fewer and less, who and whom.
I am puzzled because I ask myself the question, "Why did languages start out complex in the first place?" Lithuanian, which is kind of a linguistic fossil, has 16 different inflections for all those cases. Latin has 5, German has 4, and English mostly 1, or at most 1 1/2.
If we extrapolate backwards, we end up with very complex languages in the beginning. If we posit, as some of my friends do, we have languages that start out simple, evolve into complexity, and then start becoming more streamlined, less complex.
Why should this have happened? The only answer I can think of at the moment is that language came under the control of the priestly classes, who used it as a barrier to the common folk. There is an analog to this in Medieval Europe, when the common folk were discouraged from reading the Bible. Language was the province of the learned and the priests, who stood to profit from impenetrability.
Rebels of various stripes have long known that literacy is a key to the uprising of the masses. Unfortunately for them, when people become literate, they learn to distrust priests of any sect whatsoever, even the cult of St. Marx.

Laws of language change

2009-07-21T11:02:00.000-07:00

I (frequently) remark that there are two laws of language change: 1) language changes, and 2) you can't do anything about rule number 1. I think I need to add a third: 3) language percolates up rather than trickling down.
The "up" and "down" are social/economic/power/education indicators. Those who are on the top end of the spectrum don't really want language to change. They are happy with it the way it is, and have invested considerable time and energy to mastering the nuances of language that mark them as top drawer.
Consider, for instance, the whole dreary who/whom thing. Exactly when do you use whom? The rule is difficult to elucidate and complex in execution. I can do it, mostly, but then, I've spent my entire adult life studying such things.
There are people (gasp) who have not the time, inclination, or energy for such linguistic shenanigans. These people, when faced with a who/whom dilemma, do one of three things: 1) use who in all cases, 2) substitute that for who, or 3) leave who out altogether when they can.
So, the sentence
I know the man whom my sister loves
Becomes
I know the man who my sister loves
I know the man that my sister loves
I know the man my sister loves
The first of these three is still frowned on in some circles, but the second and third have become standard usage.
Voila! Language change.

Paradoxes

2009-06-25T10:18:00.000-07:00

At base, language is a way of showing relationships. A normal sentence in what language ever usually consists of a noun phrase, a verb phrase, and a noun phrase. The noun phrases name things; the verb phrase defines the relationship between them. "Ice is cold," shows us the relationship between the object, ice, and the condition, cold.
With me so far? One of the problems with language is that it doesn't put any necessary conditions on any of these relationships (It does, actually, but bear with me). So, you can put a noun phrase-verb phrase-noun phrase combo together that doesn't make sense, such as "The cheese imagined the bookcase." Well, maybe it makes sense in Wonderland, but not in my office where I have both cheese and a bookcase.
We can even put together a combination that is self-contradictory, such as "No generalization is worth a damn." Since that's a generalization, it isn't worth a damn. But wait, if it doesn't hold, then it's okay to say it. Wait! If it holds, then it doesn't hold.
People waste a lot of time worrying about paradoxes such as this.
It helps if we remember that paradoxes are literary constructs, and have no relationship to reality. Outside of language, there are no paradoxes.
Now, doesn't that make you feel better.

Clarity denied

2009-06-18T10:37:00.000-07:00

Some years back, the National Council of Teachers of English developed a "doublespeak" department. Doublespeak is a term invented by George Orwell to describe the language used in the novel 1984. There, language is used to confuse, obfuscate, and generally mislead people. The NCTE had tons of fun with the Department of Defense during the Vietnam war, citing example after example of what they considered doublespeak.
Well, doublespeak is alive and well. And it has consequences. Let me explain.
This morning, my local paper carried a story on two alumni basketball players who gave $100,000 to the local university. Nice, no? Okay, but pay attention. Here's what the article said:"the university has developed plans to renovate and expand the off-court facilities within the [arena] to build a sustainable future. [paragraph break] These renovations will enhance space for practice and game day preparation." (Logan Herald Journal, June 18, B-1)
Notice the lack of specificity? That's one good sign that we are being doublespoken. We're not too sure what the loot is going to be used for. The references to "off court," and "enhance space for ... game day preparation" lead me to believe that they are going to gussy up the locker room, possibly with electronic games, TV, a sauna, massage therapy, walk-in fridge, pool table, leather couches, or any manner of gold-plated accessories.
The consequences of doublespeak? If you are not specific, you have no one to blame but yourself if people assume the worst. I don't know that the university is a little ashamed of what the money is going to be used for. Or feels that people might "take it wrong," or "misunderstand." But it's a pretty good bet.
Unless, of course, the writer simply has no idea how to report news.

Punctuation

2009-06-17T12:53:00.000-07:00

You can get along without punctuation at all, you know. Don Marquis, a newspaperman, wrote a series of articles in the 20's and 30's that were later collected in a book, Archie and Mehitabel. The purported writer of the articles was a free-verse poet who died and whose soul was transmigrated into a cockroach. The cockroach couldn't make capitals or punctuation on the typewriter, as he actuated each key by diving onto it head first. It's wonderful reading and I recommend it to everyone.
But we are neither cockroaches nor free-verse poets (most of us), and we need punctuation. So, what's the most important punctuation mark? Look at the sentences you've just read and it should become clear. There are lots of periods, to be sure, but they simply serve to end the sentence, and we could probably make do without them. It's the commas that we use mostly. I've written elsewhere about getting rid of apostrophes, and I think that semicolons are the scum of the punctuation world, but commas we can't get rid of (Do you know the joke about the English teacher who fell down, hit her head, and was in a comma for a year?).
Because they are so important, they can be (and are) misused. In fact, there's a whole book about the misuses of the comma: Eats, Shoots, and Leaves.
Are there any simple rules for using commas? Yes: If you have lots of comas in a sentence, re-write the sentence.

Troublesome words

2009-06-13T19:25:00.000-07:00

Quick now. what is the difference between ravel and unravel? Or, what is the difference between flammable and inflammable? The answer in both cases is, "There isn't any." Flammable and inflammable both mean, "able to burn," and ravel and unravel both mean "coming apart, as fabric." Which is good, because if Shakespeare had to say that sleep "knits up the unraveled sleeve of care," he'd be in trouble because it doesn't scan well. And how about a good old word like entrance. "But," you say, "that's a common word with no problems." Oh yeah? How about this sentence, "Her words served to entrance me." Ouch. Different word entirely, same spelling. English does that rather a lot. Two words will look alike, be spelled alike, and yet have no relationship to each other. Or, in a related case, take two words that mean about the same thing: base and basis. They came into the language at different times from a common root word. Now, the plural of base is bases. The plural of basis is also bases, but pronounced differently. It would be something like basees, with the long e of bee or peen.
Remember, when you hear the Germans or the Spanish bragging about their languages' regular pronunciation that it's a poor language that has only one way of doing things.

Glitches

2009-06-08T12:06:00.001-07:00

I've said it before and I'll say it again: The problem with "grammatical" errors is not that they violate some cosmic law, but that they confuse or, more to the point, distract. We pay attention to the language and not to the meaning. Consider, for instance, the following announcements, which I gathered in yesterday.

The yellow one shows the classic subject/verb problem. The subject (displays) is plural, but the verb (is) is singular. Now, we wouldn't normally say "displays is," so why is it done here? It's clear, isn't it, that the phrase "of affection" is the culprit. It's between the subject and the verb, and the fact that affection is singular (well, non-count) seduced the writer into using the singular verb.

The cure? Try not to put anything between the subject and the verb.

Here's another one, a different problem. In this one, the writer has, unfortunately used the wrong word. It's in the one that goes "A person having any exposed sub-epidermal..." Note that one of the problems is persons that have "other legions." So, if you're going to use the public pool, leave your army behind, or at least, keep them out of sight. The proper word, of course, is lesions.

Palindromes and onomatopoeia

2009-05-31T18:20:00.001-07:00

A palindrome, as you no doubt know, is a linguistic artifact that reads the same backwards and forwards. Dad is a palindrome, as are sis, mom, and poop, although palindromes are usually names. The neat thing is that even sentences can be palindromes, such as "Madam, I'm Adam," and "Able was I ere I saw Elba," presumably referring to Napoleon.
What bothers me about palindromes is that the name itself, isn't palindromic. We should have a name such as likeekil, or sameemas, or worddrow (I like that one best).
The same goes for onomatopoeia, or words that sound like the thing they name. Words like buzz, bang, pop, and scrunch are all onomatopoetic. Problem is, how do we get a name that sounds like what it names? The closest we could get, I think, would be to use an onomatopoetic word as a terms for the category in general. In the 19th century, linguists supposed that language began as people imitating sounds. It's known as the Yo ho (heave ho) theory. So, I propose that from now on, onomatopoeia be called "Yo ho." For one thing, it carries the spirit of naming things. For another, it's much easier to spell.

Canine Capers in the Press

2009-05-21T09:15:00.001-07:00

My local paper is always a source of delight to me, and today's blog is courtesy of them, or of the caption writer who comments on the photos.
Most "grammatical" errors don't actually confuse people. They may distract for a moment, but generally the meaning of "he done it" is as clear as "he did it."
What leads us into sin is punctuation. And one of the ripest fields for error is the additional information we put into sentences as phrases or clauses. The misplaced modifier or dangling participle. And if you don't like sentence fragments, tough. My favorite dangling modifier is (and I got this on an essay), "Having rotted in the cellar, my brother and I were unable to sell the potatoes." After a little bit, we can figure out that it was the potatoes that rotted, but the concept of the two brothers quietly moldering in the cellar is hilarious.
So look at the caption on the photo I've posted. In case you can't read it, it says, "This Jan. 29, 2009, photo shows the scarred face of Lucas, a pit bull used in Michael Vick's dogfighting operation at Best Friends Animal Sanctuary, north of Kanab, Utah." The locative phrase, "at Best Friends Animal Hospital" is in the wrong place, so it sounds like that's where the dogfighting operation was.
I can see it now, a dogfighting operation at an animal sanctuary. The dogs have to wear gloves and can't hit below the belt. The referee stops the fight if one fighter looks dog-tired (sorry, couldn't resist).
The cure is really simple: cut the sentence in two. There's really no reason to try and get it all in one sentence.

Ambiguity

2009-04-17T08:46:00.000-07:00

One of the characteristics of any language is ambiguity. Ambiguity means that an utterance can have more than one interpretation. For instance, there's lexical ambiguity ("Replace the pencil," can mean "Put the pencil back," or "Take the pencil away and put another in its place.") Or, there's structural ambiguity (The classic example from Chomsky is "Visiting relatives can be tedious.") Finally, there's situational ambiguity (A letter of reference that says, "You will be lucky if you can get him to work for you.")
In some situations, such as legal documents, ambiguity is disastrous. In others, it can be funny, intentionally or otherwise. For instance, I come into my children's' bedroom and see feather pillows all over the place. I say, "Well, aren't we being good." The situation is strictly speaking, ambiguous, since the sentence can be taken one of two ways: as sincere or as sarcastic. Generally, things like the situation and voice tone can disambiguate the sentence.
One of the interesting things about ambiguity is that when we run across it we don't normally recognize it as ambiguity. Instead, we choose one of the interpretations and simply go with it. Take another sentence from Chomsky: "The shooting of the hunters was terrible." People will choose one or the other of the meanings (but you got them both, right?) and not even see the other one. So strong is this tendency that some people can't see the ambiguity until it is carefully pointed out to them. I've always thought that the ability to see ambiguity is both a blessing and a curse.

Right spelling; wrong word

2009-03-04T11:07:00.000-08:00

I try not to make fun of the linguistic foibles of my fellow beings. The reason is that most of what people call "mistakes" are simply other dialects or emerging changes in the language. A case in point: If you go to a supermarket, you'll see a sign that says something like "Express line. Ten items or less." To be strictly in line with traditional usage, it should be "Ten items or fewer." But the distinction is disappearing, so I tend not to fuss about it.
However, there are times when I simply can't resist. So, here are my offerings poking fun at people who mis-use the language. The first is from a sign on the gate of a swimming pool at a university where I taught. The sign read, "This pool for faculty and staph only." I don't recall that I ever used the pool. The second item is from a sign in my favorite hot springs, where I to to (frequently) soak. The sign notes, in part, that people with sores, cuts, open wounds, or other legions can't use the pool. I'm surely glad, because I wouldn't want to share the pool with a legion, especially if it's the French Foreign one.
Laughs aside, there's a reason for these glitches. Though this is hotly debated, I believe that there is a sharp disconnect between our oral language processing and our written language processing. The systems don't talk to each other all that well, and information from one doesn't naturally seep over to the other. So, a person who's a good talker and an intelligent person may not be a good speller. Or may well exhibit the hallmark of modern computer-assisted writing: all the words spelled correctly, but not necessarily the right word.

Weird plurals

2009-02-22T17:12:00.000-08:00

I think I've mentioned before that plurals in English can be sort of confusing, because of a number of factors. One is that we borrow wholesale from other languages. The second is that we may or may not borrow the plural form of a noun. Or, what is worse, we may borrow the traditional plural and then gradually trade it for our English s plural, so that for a time a noun may have two plural forms. The plural of cactus was (and still may be in some places) cacti. Other charmers are hippopotami (true!) and stadia (plural of stadium). A cherub is an angel. So is a seraph. The plurals were cherubim and seraphim, but now mostly cherubs and seraphs. But what about a noun like haitus? What's the plural here? Haiti (or is that the country)? Or Quietus? The fact is that I've never encountered the plurals of those two words, and without looking them up, which I am too lazy to do, I guess I'll never know.
The comedian Shelly Berman once did a bit in which he discussed the problem plurals. He came up with kleenex/kleenices; goof/geef; stewardess/stewardi; and my favorite, the plural jacki.

Vowels

2009-02-18T09:51:00.000-08:00

Vowels are the troublemakers of the linguistic world. Consonants stay pretty much constant (Not completely true, as German speakers, for instance, have two versions of our "l," and we have three different versions of "p"). Vowels are made by activating the vocal chords, and varying the shape of the oral cavity as the air rushes through it. This gives lots of room for tinkering.
Now, vowel sounds can differ dramatically from person to person, depending on a number of factors. There's even a song about it: "I say potayto, you say patahto..." But there's an interesting subset of vowel sounds that I find intriguing simply because they are so subtle that we might not even notice them. The word roof, for instance. It can be pronounced ruff or roof. The word caught can be pronounced cot or cawt. There's an international phonetic alphabet which was developed to catch these differences, but it's quite cumbersome and a pain in the neck to learn.
The point, though, is that the differences are there, and have some interesting consequences. Where I live, for instance, people don't differentiate between the vowel sounds in pin and pen, sale and sell. Here's the good part. If you don't differentiate in your own speech, you will probably not recognize the difference in the speech of others, who do. So, I am used to seeing signs that say, "For sell."
Does this mean that the people who don't make the distinction are tone deaf? Not at all. Does it mean that they are linguistically challenged? Again, not at all. It's just that their dialect has conflated some sets of sounds. Just normal language behavior.

Pesky plurals

2009-01-06T08:29:00.000-08:00

In English, the basic rule for plurals is straightforward: If it's a plural, put an s on it. All new words adhere to this rule. If you invent a word, say, grunch, and you pluralize it, it's grunches. Easy.
Except with Old English words, foreign words, collective nouns, and nouns where you aren't sure whether the situation calls for singular or plural. I want to talk about the last, but let me get the others out of the way first.
Old English had a jillion ways of making plurals. One was to add a suffix: child, children. One was to change the internal spelling: goose, geese. Some have changed over the years (there is a plural of ox that is oxes). Many, especially the familiar ones, stay with us and give us trouble.
Foreign words make foreign plurals. Many of them we have changed. The plural of stadium was once stadia, and the plural of cactus was cacti (still is in some cases). Some stay with us: alumnus, alumni.
Collective nouns are those that indicate a group: congress, parliament. In the U.S., collectives are singular; in England they are plural: congress is, parliament are.
Now the last case. Media began life as a plural. The singular is/was medium. But, over the years, the term media has acquired a new meaning, that of the news disseminators, and it has become, in this sense at least, a collective. So, media is now (in one of its senses) a singular. The media is. In other uses, it might remain a plural. Same with data, which is a plural of datum, only nobody cares, so we can say "The data are" or "The data is" and either one works.

Creativity in pronuciation

2008-12-03T19:56:00.000-08:00

All languages are creative. In fact, that's one of the generally accepted criterion for deciding what is or isn't a language. By creative, we mean that a language can change to adapt to new situations, new social realities, new technology. So, even French is creative.
One of the ways that English is especially creative is its willingness to adopt words from other languages and use them, sometimes with the original meaning, sometimes extended metaphorically. The word flak, for instance, is a German acronym, Flieger Abwehr Kanone (spelling approximate), or flier defense cannon. Those bursts you see in the air around bombers in WWII movies are flak. We adopted it and then adapted it to mean any disruption from others.

One of the interesting differences between American English and British English is in how we treat borrowed words. In America, we try to preserve the original pronunciation, even though it may not fit our Germanic accent-on-the-first-syllable pattern. Take the word garage, for instance. It's from the French, and we pronounce it one of two ways: garazhe or garadge, but in both cases with the accent on the second syllable, the way the French do. The Brits, on the other hand, give it a good old-fashioned English pronunciation, with the accent on the first syllable.

All in all, I think the Brits have the smartest strategy. It makes words easier to pronounce because they conform to English patterns. I don't know if we Americans try to pronounce garage and barrage and others in the French way in attempt to placate the French for stealing their words, but it doesn't work, so why try?

When is champagne not champagne?

2008-11-24T11:08:00.000-08:00

Saw an ad in a news magazine the other day. Seems that France is up in arms about the theft of one of its words. The word champagne, they say, refers to a region in France and is the name of the sparkling wine produced in that area. It is a legal but morally fraudulent practice to name any other sparkling beverage champagne.
What they mean is, of course, that a champagne produced in California shouldn't be labeled champagne because it isn't produced in champagne.
In this, the ad falls error to a common misconception in language use, and that is the belief that somehow any word is connected to an invisible cord that leads back to the original word. If one learns the word champagne, for instance, one learns (magically, mysteriously) that the word denotes not a general type of beverage but a specific type of beverage.
What the belief ignores is twofold: First, people learn what words mean by identifying them with what they know about the world. When I learned about champagne, I learned only that it was a sparkling alcoholic beverage. Period. It wasn't later that I learned about the area in France, and not until very much later that I learned about France's desire to keep the word French. Second, a word means what everybody thinks it means, and the meanings of words change, will we nill we. If this were not so, virtue would still mean strength.
My advice to the French would be, "Live with it. You don't have a leg to stand on."
Not that they will pay much attention to me.

Creativity in Language

2008-11-19T11:58:00.000-08:00

There are tons of books out there telling us what is wrong with the English language and how we can fix it. Many trees have died so that we can learn the difference between shall and will (there isn't any), fewer and less (there isn't any), and who and whom (there isn't any).
All these accounts assume that language is a thing, an object. But it isn't. We have grammar books, but they aren't language. We have dictionaries, but they're not language either. Ditto linguistics texts, writing texts, thesauri. Language isn't a thing; it's a process. It's the means (which we don't understand) by which idea hops from person to person.
As such, it's versatile and creative. It diverges, converges, loops, fragments, coheres, and does almost anything but remain frozen in the form you learned from Ms. Fidditch, your 5th grade English teacher.
Consider two-word verbs, for instance. Compare "I looked over the wall," with "I looked over the document." A moment's thought will show that in the first sentence, we have subject (I), verb (looked), and a prepositional phrase (over the wall). But that won't work with the second sentence, which has a subject (I), but the verb (looked over), and a direct object (the document).
Or consider the next step. We take a two-word verb and make it into a noun. So, the two-word verb look over becomes the noun, lookover, as in, "Give this memo a lookover will you?"
Two things are amazing: That the process happens, and that we get it the first time we hear it. Can't do much better than that.

Being old fashioned

2008-10-20T08:32:00.000-07:00

When I discuss my views on language to people, a comment I often get is, "Oh, then you believe anything goes." Well, no. I believe that language is a rule-governed activity, and that there are rights and wrongs. But, I also believe that the rights and wrongs change over time and that the rules are often not what people think they are.

Still, there are times when I become a little put out that people don't take more trouble to actually think about what they are writing. I am fond of quoting Alfred Korzybski, the founder of general semantics, when he said, "I say what I say; I do not say what I do not say." In other words, "Pay attention. Language is not a sledgehammer; it's a scalpel."

A case in point. In today's issue of the university paper is a sentence that I love for it's lack of direction. The sentence reads, in part, "... a freshman majoring in biology native to Price, Utah." Hmmmm. Just what is it native to Price, Utah, the freshman or the biology? Structurally it's the biology, but I strongly suspect that it's really the freshman. A simply rearrangement of words would disambiguate the sentence, "...a freshman from Price, Utah majoring in biology."

Or, there's this headline from the same paper: "Indian Students Celebrate Festival." I'm a little uncomfortable with that headline, since it's slightly redundant and a little off kilter. We normally hold festivals and celebrate occasions. The fact that the writer kind of scrambled the two usages makes me focus more on the language than on the meaning, and that's a bad thing.

Innocent bystanders

2008-10-17T14:12:00.001-07:00

Consider the word "niggardly." It sounds awful, doesn't it, makes one think it's racist. It isn't, and has no connection historically with the other N-word. There is a news story somewhere about a person who was fired because he used the word "niggardly," and his superior thought he was being racist. It actually means "stingy," according to the only source I trust, the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary. It is not allied to, derived from, or derived from the same source as the other N-word (which is a southernized pronunciation of the word negro).

Ah, but as my friend Bill likes to say, "There's the rub" In a discussion with a group of intelligent people the other day, I learned that the word "niggardly" (henceforth the other N-word) makes people uncomfortable. In addition, they tend to think that it is somehow connected to the N-word. At first, I was upset with this. I mean, how could people be so blind, so ignorant, so, so.....

After I cooled down, I realized I was simply watching language change in action. A new meaning for the Other N-word was in the process of being created. So, I predict that in the future, the other N-word will further cement its associations with the primary n-word and will become vocabularia non grata in almost everyone's dialect. People who know the word won't use it, and people who say the n-word will have no idea that the other n-word exists.

Finally, to seal its fate, the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, which refuses list demeaning or sexual words, will drop it from its list. Thus, a perfectly good word, which has done nothing to deserve such a fate, will become an outcast. Language change, like evolution, is good for the entire population but sometimes hard on the individual.

Truth in headlines

2008-10-08T17:02:00.001-07:00

I remember an address given some years back entitled "Truth is a Linguistic Question." I didn't accept the premises of the address, but sometimes I wonder.
Like now, for instance. I have noticed a strange disconnect between the headlines in my local newspaper and the news accounts as they unfold in the actual articles. On Monday, the headline read, "Most banks won't make it," implying that in my town of, oh, a dozen banks, at the end of the financial crisis only two or three would be standing. The others would be piles of smoking rubble, with citizens poking about in the detritus looking for a stray roll of quarters.
The article itself suggested that perhaps one hundred banks in the U.S. could fail in the next little while. Okay, then Utah's share is two. That's a far cry from most.
The second headline was about the local university, and read, "Enrollment shows downward trend." Well, not really. In fact, most emphatically not. The enrollment is at its second highest level ever. Only last year was greater. So, if one looks at the two years running, it's true that the enrollment has dropped, but a one-year anomaly is not even close to a trend, or to a spiral, or to whatever it was they called it.
A great many times, as I leaf through the daily paper, I don't read the articles. I'll glance at the headline and use that to flesh out my picture of the day. What happens when the headline is a little beside the point, or a lot beside the point, or of the point altogether, or not even in the same county with the point?
So, I think I need to amend Mark Twain's quote. I'll put it, "There are lies, damn lies, and headlines."

Who and whom

2008-10-05T16:00:00.000-07:00

Who is, of course, a relative pronoun. It's used when we have a sentence embedded inside another sentence, and both share the same subject. So, let's say we have a sentence "The man is a friend of mine," and we want to specify which man. We can embed a second sentence inside the first, and come up with "The man [the man lives up stairs] is a friend of mine," where the bracketed sentence is the embedded one. Then we change the embedded noun phrase (the man) to a relative pronoun, who, and come up with "The man who lives up stairs is a friend of mine." Tada!
This works well when both noun phrases are subjects, but what if one is an object? Pay attention now. Here's a sentence: "The man [My sister loves the man] is a friend of mine." Now, the noun phrase in the embedded sentence is an object. We can make it into a relative pronoun just fine, but the rule in English is that a relative pronoun has to immediately follow the noun phase that it's attached to. So, we get "The man who my sister loves is a friend of mine."
Wait a minute. That's not right. The pronoun who has a subject form, who, and an object form, whom. So, in the embedded sentence, it's not who but whom, so the correct form of the sentence is "The man whom my sister loves is a friend of mine."
Whew. Lots of work, no?
And not really worth it. So, the English language (and definitely not English teachers) has evolved strategies to get around the complexity of who/whom. There are three of them:
1. Don't worry about it. Just use who in all cases. After all, who knows? Who cares?
2. Replace the who with that. Thus we get the sentence, "The man that my sister loves is a friend of mine."
3. Leave the relative pronoun out altogether. Say, "The man my sister loves is a friend of mine."
It's amazing how creative and logical people are when they have to deal with linguistic deadwood.

Death to the apostrophe

2008-09-08T11:28:00.000-07:00

I've had it. Here's a headline from a local newspaper: "Favre throw's two TD's, get's first win as a Jet." There are three uses of the apostrophe in this short sentence. One is not really necessary (TD's) and the other two are flat wrong. And I have discussed earlier the use of an apostrophe to indicate the plural.
So, rather than fulminate further, I'm going to do something about it. I'm going to call for the complete abolition of the apostrophe. Let's get rid of them all.
After all, what service does the apostrophe give? Does it differentiate between clauses, as the comma does? Or call things into question? Or terminate things? None of the above. All the apostrophe does is to indicate that a letter is missing. Can't is can not, that sort of thing. Notice that we say can't all the time, you never hear the apostrophe and somehow we get along just fine (there are speaking analogs to periods, commas, exclamation marks, and question marks). So, speech doesn't need an apostrophe at all. Why, then, should we need them in writing?
So, what are apostrophes supposed to do? They give us contractions and possessives. That's about it. What would happen if we didn't use them at all? Would a sentence like "I judge a mans intentions by his actions" be unintelligible or even unclear? Once we have gotten past our apostrophe dependence, the sentence is quite clear. Or, how about, "The boys restroom is down the hall." Any clarity problems? Nope.
The apostrophe is not a significant differentiator. A question mark clearly indicates a question. A capital clearly indicates a sentence is starting. But an apostrophe doesn't really work much. It's just along for the ride.
In fact, the apostrophe is clearly at the root of one of the dilemmas of modern time: Do I write its or it's? So, off with their head's.

A lesson in phonology

2008-09-07T15:52:00.000-07:00

Phonology is the linguistic study of sound, as opposed to phonetics, which is a hokey way of trying to get people to read.
English has a lot of problematic words, such as words that end in -ence or -ance, and words like effect/affect. The problem stems from a curious phonological fact in English. It's this: unaccented vowels all assume the same sound. That sound is called schwa, and is represented by an upside-down lowercase e. The sound produced is uh, and is the most prevalent sound in English. So, my name, Ronald, is pronounced ron-uh-ld. Try it, but don't use careful speech. Say a word as you normally would (the as thuh rather than thee).
The result is that words like effect and affect are pronounced the same: uh-ffect. This make it hard to distinguish them when we right them down. The problem with effect/affect is compounded by some additional uses of the two words. Affect is usually a verb (How will this affect us?). However, there is a word affect that is a noun, and refers to the emotional side of things (There was no affect in his voice; it was toneless). And, to make things even more scary, while effect is usually a noun (What effect will this have?) It can also be used as a verb (We need to effect a change.)
So what we have is one word that's a verb, mostly, and one word that's a noun, mostly, and both (or all four) sound alike. No wonder spellers have trouble.

lie/lay and sit/set

2008-09-02T20:02:00.001-07:00

Okay, quick now, do you say, "Yesterday I lay in bed all day," or do you say, "Yesterday I laid in bed all day"? How about, "I know I set the clock on the table," as opposed to, "I know I sat the clock on the table"?

These two little gems have been giving people fits for years. The rule goes something like this: If you place something, you lay it or set it (past tense, laid and set). If you place yourself, you lie or sit (past tense lay and sat). I think I've got it right. The present tense of lay is the same as the past tense of lie.

The difference in usage seems to be that lay/set have direct objects (clock) whereas lie/sit don't. One doesn't sit anything. One just sits (or lies).

Actually, almost nobody pays any attention to the rule anymore. It simply isn't worth the trouble. So, the rule is moving closer and closer to the trash can, pausing on the brink only because so many English teachers and keepers of the grammar flame won't let it die.

The changers of language (who are most definitely not English teachers) seem to do a cost/benefit analysis of linguistic usage, and if the payoff in clarity isn't worth the effort to acquire the skill, they simply abandon it. It's been happening in English since roughly 450 AD, or the year English became a language.

Think about it though. How much benefit do we get from using lay/lie and sit/set "properly"? Is there any meaning lost when someone gets it wrong? No, because one is transitive and one is intransitive; one has an object, one doesn't. It's that simple. No meaning loss, no reason for the rule to be there.

Let it die; I shan't mourn.

Apostrophe's as plural markers

2008-08-29T08:26:00.000-07:00

One of the things that bugs me is that people are using an apostrophe as a marker for the plural. So, it's one boy, two boy's. What bugs me is that I can't see a reason for it. Most language change in English represents a streamlining of the syntax (Thaes cyninges becomes of the king. Trust me, it's a streamlining) or vocabulary (taxicabriolet becomes either taxi or cab). If we look at some dialects of English, we can see this in operation. In one dialect, you can say "The boys," but "The two boy," leaving off the "s" altogether, since it's redundant. With such a streamlining, I'll predict that nouns will become regular in form, so that eventually we would have one sheep and two sheeps. It's already that way for cow. We no longer speak much of cattle, but of cows. The same is true for non-count nouns (nouns that are usually not pluralized). When we speak of coffee, for instance, we get the awkward, "cup of coffee," designation, since coffee is not regularly pluralized in the sense of "a brewed beverage." But that's changing, isn't it. We say, "Two coffees," meaning "two cups of coffee."
Purists, of course, grind their tooths at this. They're the ones who think that contact has no place as a verb and that we're getting sloppy and losing our ability to think and dropping several dozen IQ points.
Not so, of course. Except for boy's as a plural. I can't buy that.

The Gnomes in the Dictionary Place

2008-08-25T21:25:00.000-07:00

Ever wonder who makes the rules of grammar? They are not absolute, you know, even if Miss Fidditch, your fifth-grade English teacher, made it seem that way. They do change. So, who does the changing? The dictionary weasels out of any responsibility by putting the onus for change on 'the best writers." Okay, but who are they and who decides that they are the 'best?" If it's popularity, then Star Trek beats Rigoletto hands down.
It seems to be the case that the people who decide who the best writers are are also the people who decide what words to use and also seem to be (strangely enough) the same best writers that were selected by, can you guess it, themselves.
I remember a quote from way back. I wish I could remember the source. It goes: "There are two kinds of people: the righteous and the unrighteous. The classifying is done by the righteous."
It's a self-feeding autocracy, folks, and I'm not part of it
For instance, not too long ago, as glaciers go, the Government Printing Office Style Manual (didn't know there was such a thing, did you?) made some changes in the way we do things. They eliminated the periods from a lot of abbreviations. The abbreviation for foot is now ft, without the period. So, who made the change and why wasn't I asked about it?

Speeling

2008-08-22T15:26:00.000-07:00

A very close friend sent me a link to an article on spelling. Seems that several misspellings are becoming legitimate. One, so my friend said, was "seperate" (the real spelling is separate). I assume this will upset a great many people, who see such changes in spelling as moving from "correct" (please note the quotation marks) to "illiterate."
What such folks (and I sympathize with them in a couple of cases) don't realize is that this is not random. There are powerful linguistic forces driving these changes. There is a strong drive toward regularity, for instance. That's why we no longer say, "I boke a loaf of bread," or "Hang up your hosen." Also, there is a strong drive toward spellings that make sense, no easy task in a language like English, which is a 1500-year-old patchwork quilt. So, when people write seperate instead of separate, they do so because it makes sense. I applaud the move to make alright an acceptable alternative to all right. In two generations, alright will be favored and in five all right will be available only as "all okay."
This thing has been going on for centuries. People have been misspelling words and the misspellings have become standard. A napron became an apron. Hros became horse.
So, whose fault is it that we have so many words hard to spell? I blame three cultures: Rome, Greece, and France. Rome because it gave us so many odd plurals (the plural of stadium is still sometimes stadia). Ditto Greece (phenomenon, phenomena). French, you might say, is an outgrowth of Latin, so why put them by themselves? Two reasons. First, French is not descended from classical Latin, but from the bastard Latin spoken by illiterate, coarse, Roman soldiers. Second, a sizable chunk of our vocabulary came from France with his highness William, cognomen Bastardus, the Conqueror. And of course, no French word is spelled anywhere near the way it sounds, so there you have it.
What the people who misspell words are doing is kind of straightening out some historical bumps in the road. More power to them. Let's go to work on calendar, supersede, and all those annoying -ance/-ence and -ent/-ant words.

Things Changing

2008-08-21T20:01:00.000-07:00

Most of the obvious change in language is in the form of vocabulary. Words come in, words hang around for a couple of centuries, words go out (more slowly, 'cause the dictionaries keep them alive). But there are other changes taking place more slowly, but taking place nevertheless.
Syntax, or the study of sentence structures, is thought to be fairly stable. And it certainly is more stable than vocabulary. There have been some major syntactic changes in the past, though. For on thing, we've gone from being a language like German, which signals parts of speech with changes (Der Mann for a subject, Den Mann for a direct object) to a language which uses word order to establish meaning (Man bites dog and Dog bites man don't mean the same thing in English, but Der Mann beisst den Hund and Den Hund beisst der Mann do).
One of the interesting facets of this word order thing is that it sets up expectations in the minds of the readers/hearers. English is an SVO language. That is, we have a Subject, a Verb, and some sort of Object (Doesn't matter what kind, forget all that direct, indirect, objective complement, subjective complement stuff).
So, here's a short quiz. One of the following sentence forms is gradually disappearing. Which one?

A. I gave the book to Alice.
B. I gave Alice the book.

I have no hard data on this, naturally, but I'll bet the second one is the goner. Why? It's got the form S, V, IO, O (Indirect Object), which frustrates our expectations.
On the other hand, archaic forms are remarkably resistant to being killed, so it may well stay on for a while. Like ox, oxen (but not shoe, shoon)

How many words are there in English?

2008-08-20T11:15:00.000-07:00

I read recently that sometime in September English will acquire its one millionth word. I also read somewhere sometime ago that English had more than one million words already. So, who's right? And, how do we know?
See, the problem is that we really don't know how to count whether a word, say, "time," is one word or many. Last time I looked, the word time had six different categories and 41 definitions within those categories. Some were very close, and could be said to be shades of meaning, some were different meanings, and some were different words that happened to be spelled the same.
English has clearly the largest vocabulary of any language that we know of (The exact size of Klingon not being known). But it's actually much smaller than one million words, for a number of reasons.
First, as I've noted above, numerous words, such as time, run, face, hand, may or may not be different words, depending on how we look at them and how well we argue our points.
Second, there are words which are still on the books but are so archaic that we use them only in crosswords and Scrabble. Words like grot (grotto) and arew (arrow) fall in this category,
Third, there are words so specialized in their meaning that they are used by about one half of one tenth of one fifth of one percent of the population. Words like epiclesis (invocation).
Fourth, there are slang words, with often have the life expectancy of a mayfly, flitting in and out of the lexicon, living and dying in an instant. Words like george, zoot, bad, rad, have all at one time meant good.
So, if you don't know a million words, don't worry. You can make do with the 50,000 words that you recognize (If not know how to use).

Language perfection

2008-08-18T17:43:00.000-07:00

One of the hardest things for people (me included) to accept is that there is no one true and perfect form of any language. We are all grammar snobs to a certain extent, convinced that the way we were taught English was the way English is. The idea that the language flexes, warps, moves underfoot, and responds to whims of political and economic power is a hard one to get one's mind around.
Nonetheless, it's true. Here's how it works. Let's say that, oh, 1500 years ago or so you have a developing country. Let's call it England. In this land are a number of different versions of the language. They are all pretty much equal in status, and serve more to differentiate people geographically than any other way. Sort of, "I tell by your speech that you come from north of the Humber." Let's call these different versions dialects. As is inevitable, the geographic sections of the country kind of align themselves in an economic and social stack, with the more powerful, wealthy, and populated sections gaining prestige. As the parts of the country gain prestige, so do their dialects. Generally, one dialect will emerge as king of the hill and will assume the status of language, with all other dialects socially subservient to it.
Gradually also, the other dialects will come to be seen as imperfect forms of the standard language. Thus cockney, which is a perfectly good linguistic structure, comes to be seen as a depraved form of "English." And its speakers are looked down on as unschooled and possibly stupid.

The two rules of language

2008-08-12T19:03:00.000-07:00

There are two crucial rules about language that everyone, especially highschool English teachers, ought to know. The two rules are
Rule one: Language changes
Rule two: You can't do anything about rule number one

There are some interesting corollaries to these rules. For one thing, language change does not come from the upper crusts of society, who have invested lots of time and energy into being able to differentiate who from whom. Language change comes from the streets -- always has. Scholars point to all the new words coined by Shakespeare, but that's just a drop in the bucket (so to speak). It's the masses, man, who change the syntax and drive the acquisition of new vocabulary.

How has language changed? Well, if we look at it long-term, it's easy to see. Compare Beowulf, which is in English, or Chaucer, who wrote in English, or Shakespeare, who wrote in English, or Jane Austen, who wrote in English, with what goes on today.

Wait a minute? Jane Austen? She writes just like we do. If you think that, you haven't been paying attention. For one thing Janey adheres to a rule we haven't had for quite some time now: the I shall/I will rule. Do you know it? I thought not. It goes like this:

"I shall" means "I intend to"
"I will" means "I am determined to"

"You will" means "You intend to"
"You shall" means "You are obligated to"

Note how the sense of obligation versus simple futurity changes? That's probably why the rule is dead. It seems to be the case that if a rule is more trouble than it's worth, or if it's not really necessary, it's scrapped. For instance, take the rule (please) that differentiates between "fewer" and "less." "Fewer" is used with things that one counts, such as beans or chairs. "Less" is used with things that one doesn't count, such as air or animosity.

Only no one pays any attentions to it. Go through the quick line at the local supermarket and you'll see, "Ten items or less," instead of "fewer," and somehow everyone gets it right.

What happens to people who don't know the rule is that they make some pretty strange judgements on writing based on what they learned in the fifth grade. I remember a man who wouldn't pay any attention to any document that had the word "hopefully" used wrong. "Hopefully," he would lecture us, "means full of hope." It does not mean "It is to be hoped."
Well excuse me, but you have your head in the sand (at least). At one time it may have been the case that "hopefully" had that one meaning, but the times they are a changin'. By this geezer's logic a marshal is still the guy who cares for the horses and "silly" means innocent.

Still, many people believe that they are preserving the "purity of the language" when they try to hold back the tide of change. The real irony of this is that the language never was pure in the first place.