The Language Lady

The Penultimate

2011-08-28T18:10:00.004-04:00

There are some words in English that just don’t sound like what they really mean. Like the word, “enervate,” which means “to exhaust,” but which sounds more like “energize”; fortunately, few people say, “Oooh, I’m enervated!” when they’re exhausted – more like, “I’m pooped!” so confusion is not exactly rampant.

The word, “penultimate,” on the other hand, is used more often – and a good portion of the time is used wrong. “Penultimate” is a Latin-based word whose meaning has stuck close to its roots and means nothing more than “second to last” in a series or sequence. For example, Spanish students are taught that words in that language are usually stressed on the penúltima,” syllable “as in “sombRERo,” or “tequILa.” Law students know that their penultimate year is their last chance to beef up their academic resumes before their final year places them in the real world.

Etymologically, the word comes from “paen,” meaning “almost,” and “ulimate” meaning “last” or “final.” In English, however, “penultimate” sounds like it should mean something like, “better than the best:”: When we say something is, “the ultimate,” it means that it’s the greatest; the Numero Uno; something close to divine – so saying something is the PENultimate, we (wrongly) reason, sounds like that particular something is even one little divine notch higher – the exclamation point on top of the icing on the cake, so to speak.

The funny thing about “penultimate” is that it is a sort of fancy-sounding Latin word not normally used in everyday speech, and the person using it is often striving for some more graceful turn of phrase. So it is not misused by your average Joe, but rather by those supposedly well-educated ones. Thus, the remaining portion of literate ones who actually know what “penultimate” means feel just a tad (or more) smug for catching the mistake.

I was reminded of this the other day while walking on the Upper East Side in front of two nattily dressed women, who were chatting away when I overheard one of them say to the other, “I mean, would you go to a concert run by people who don’t know what ‘penultimate’ means?” (The Language Lady antennae went straight up!)

Turns out, the San Francisco Symphony had used “penultimate” improperly in a recent program description of a certain Mozart symphony. With a little googling, I was later able to find the offending usage:

“All the otherworldly ability that Mozart possessed was brought to bear in the Jupiter Symphony, the final—and perhaps penultimate—symphony he produced.”

What the program meant, of course, was that Mozart’s final symphony was perhaps the “best of the best.” But given the actual definition of “penultimate,” the program unwittingly stated that Mozart’s final symphony was his second to last.

Personally, I feel two ways about this one word. Naturally, I applaud those who use words in the correct, standard usage. A British airline industry publication sticks with the standard definition with the headline, “Carlisle (Airport) clears penultimate expansion hurdle;” the text explains that though development plans for the airport were endorsed, the “final decision” was expected later. (Leave it to the verbal-savvy Brits to do it right.)

Cheers also to a Portland, OR high school history teacher named “Mr. Carlisle;” his blog is dotted with “penultimate” titles, such as “Dec 16 - The Penultimate Day Before Break!”; “The Penultimate Weekend!” and “The Penultimate Week of School!!” Based on the calendar of exams he gives on the latter, Mr. Carlisle is clearly trying to get his students to remember that “penultimate” means “next to last” – not “final” and not “better than best.” (Hurray for American public high school!)

Even a recent headline of the online tabloid, Examiner.com got it right: “Bob Dylan and Leon Russell – The Penultimate Show at Indiana’s Roberts Stadium,” with the first line stating that the two still-at-it rock stars played one of the stadium’s last concerts there that evening.

But what I don’t like about the word itself is that it sounds so fancy but doesn’t mean anything fancy at all. It’s like putting on airs for a pair of muddy sneakers. If we refer to a “penultimate” performance, it would be more uplifting for readers if the word actually meant his performance was the very-very last word in excellence, the crème of all his crème-iest performances – rather than just his next to last.

Misusing “penultimate” is understandable – maybe even desirable – because we could use a word to break through the crowd of “ultimate” spas, movie experiences, designer blue jeans, or even trendy cupcakes. How do we convey some breakaway experience that tops all others?

Native speakers of English tend to avoid the multi-syllabic Latinate words when shorter Anglo-Saxon ones will do: Why say “quotidian” when you can say, “daily”; “reflect” when you can simply “think”? Latin-rooted words usually give a deeper and a certain elevated meaning – like “sustenance” or “nourishment” (both Latin) over the Anglo, “food.”

In a way, “penultimate” could step up to the plate: it sounds like what we want to say – and with enough misuse, “penultimate” could change meanings, the way countless words have before it.

For example, “nice,” a 13^th century word that originally meant “ignorant,” morphed several times in meaning -- as wanton, extravagant, elegant, strange, modest, thin, and shy – until settling on “pleasant” or “agreeable” around 1750. Other common word changes include “girl,” (a young person of either sex), “quick,” (alive), and “sophisticated” (corrupt).

In his book, “The Unfolding of Language,” linguist Guy Deutscher sees the word, “wicked” as undergoing a bit of a sea change, with the word now used commonly among teenagers to mean “awesome,” or “cool:” as in “a wicked party;” or “a wicked new song.” That same meaning existed among teens from Boston back in the 60’s and 70’s - it was fairly local then and despite what Deutscher (who is British) says, local authorities (i.e. my kids) say “wicked” in the U.S. is still used only in the Northeast, not nationwide.

The words “awesome” and “awful” are two other examples of word change. “Awe” itself means a feeling of amazement mixed with fear, often coupled with a feeling of personal insignificance or powerlessness: as in, the “awe” one feels when gazing at the Grand Canyon; or to be “in awe” of someone. Yet somehow, “awful” (the combination of “awe + full”) came to mean, “terrible;” and “awesome” has more recently come to be used as a synonym for “amazing.”

If enough people start using “penultimate” to mean “better than the best,” then that too could be a new standard meaning for the word. In a Google search, “penultimate” already has support for meaning “final” and “better than the best:”

Australian TV reported a few months ago, “AMP clears penultimate hurdle to buy AXA AP,” which, the news presenter explained, meant that the corporation’s takeover bid had “cleared the final hurdles.” Here, the use of “penultimate” is as a synonym for “final”; I imagine the late-night editor not wanting to repeat “final” hurdle, and thinking “ultimate hurdle” was not right, thought “penultimate” was undoubtedly just the thing.

Curiously, the folks at iPad have developed a new application called “The Penultimate,” a play on words for an app that makes it look as though you’re drawing or taking notes by hand with a pen, though it’s actually your own finger. The app’s name implies “better than the best” -- and as one reviewer confirmed, “Penultimate is the ultimate notes app for iPad.”

So the San Francisco Symphony is not alone in using and misusing “penultimate” in its program. And Language Lady hopes MORE such misuse of this word continues. Ultimately, “penultimate” (as “second to last”) simply sounds pretentious; however, if the word’s meaning could change to “better than the best,” then calling a performance or experience “the penultimate” would be infinitely more fitting.

All who agree can simply start wedging the word into their writing, and then casually into their speech, especially when coming back from Europe or the Hamptons. In this case, a little snob value might help push “penultimate” into linguistic radar among the rest of us, and thus deliver a new and improved “penultimate” to the next generation: The penultimate in linguistic contributions.

Pronunciation Problems

2011-04-17T23:54:00.003-04:00

Anyone who has ever studied a foreign language discovers not just different words, but different sounds in those words that can have us twisting our tongues and lips in ways that seem weird and embarrassing – and we still can’t say the word right. It takes practice, skill, nerve or luck – sometimes a lifetime of all those -- to overcome our own ears and tongues when it comes to mastering the sounds of another language.

For English speakers, this can mean trampling the delicate French dipthong (when two or more vowel sounds are next to each other in the same word) in “oeil” (“eye”) with a mere, “oy;” ditto for the spectacularly gutteral “chuchichästli” (“kitchen cupboard”) in Swiss German, which an American can squash to a humdrum “hooki-heshli”; while the famously trilled Spanish “r,” as in “perro” (“dog”), is often reduced to a simple “pair-o.”

As babies, we are wired to learn and say any sound in any language, be they Cockney glottal stops and French dipthongs or African clicks. But research shows that not long after age 9 or so, most children’s wiring simply conforms to the sounds of their own mother tongue; meanwhile, the brain’s language center puts all unused sounds in deep, deep storage, so they are much harder – and sometimes impossible -- to hear and produce later on.

This is how stereotypes of foreigners learning English are born – from the fact that some of our sounds in English do not exist in other languages and foreign speakers pick the easiest ways from their languages to approximate them. I remember receiving a birthday card (in pre-politically correct days) of a Japanese man in a straw hat wishing me a “velly, velly” nice birthday. At the time I was a regular follower of the Japanese crime-fighter cartoon, “Joe Jitsu,” on “Dick Tracy and Friends,” so I already knew (roughly) that the Japanese confused the “l” and “r” sounds. Joe Jitsu would say things like, “So solly!” and “One moment prease,” and, “Carring Dick Tracy!”

But what I have learned from working with Japanese students is that they do have an “r” sound in their language – as in “karaoke” – but it is produced by tapping the tongue on the upper palate, in much the same way the British Jeeves would say “veddy propah,” and not our flat American, “very proper.” When Americans say “very” our tongue is in the lower part of our mouth, and for Japanese, this position is closer to an “l”. When Japanese say words that start with an “r,” like “rice,” they sound fine – not because they’re saying the “r” the way we say it, but because in that position, our ears do not hear a big difference.

The “L” sound is not an easy one: Even native English-speaking children are not expected to say the “L” sound until age 4 or 5. This has been born out with my own name, with little children who call me “Weeze,” “Aweeze,” or “Bah-weeze” often up til kindergarten. And saying a consonant + “l” sound is also tricky; when my son was 4 years old, he and his best friend were pretending to play instruments and his friend stopped mid-play to exclaim, “I can say ‘FLUTE!’” Before that, it had always been “fWoot.”

For the Japanese, who do not have an “l” in their language at all, L-words are likewise a problem: Try saying, “Louise,” “close,” and “English,” and notice the slightly different position that the letter takes in each word, depending on the sound next to it.

In working with a Korean man, I was surprised to discover that they confuse the “f” and “p” sounds, which produces phrases like, “Ophen the door,” and “Would you like a cuff of coppee?”

Argentines (not all Spanish speakers have this difficulty) do not distinguish their “b” and “v” sounds; for either sound, their lips barely touch, rarely touch, or never touch at all. Their capital city is pronounced closer to “Wuenos Aires,” and a simple, “muy bien,” is said with the front teeth ever so lightly touching the inside of the lower lip, which is almost exactly the same spot used to say, “Viva Maradona!”

This is not a problem, of course, unless you are an Argentine working for an American food company in New York. An Argentine student of mine was the head of the Beverage Department of a major food and beverage corporation and could not say the word, “Beverage.” He could say, “beb-rich” or “vev-rich” but not the tricky combination using both sounds. One day, I walked into his office and he had post-it notes lined up all along his shelf with “B-words” and “V-words” and “BEV-erage” to help him practice what amounted to verbally patting his heading and rubbing his stomach at the same time.

The French have trouble with the “h” sound. A sentence like “Amy will take her to the airport in half an hour” can come out like, “Hamy will take ‘er to zee hairport in ‘alf an hower.” That is, they unconsciously reverse the appropriate h-word in every case. It’s very hard for them to switch from saying “h” to not saying it and then once they do, they apply it liberally. It seems generally easier to skip the first “h” in a phrase and then exhale, so that a phrase like “How old are you?” comes out “Ow hold har you?”

Of course, hands-down, the two most confounding sounds for foreign English speakers of almost any Asian, Latin, or Germanic origin are our two “TH” sounds: The soft “voiced” one, as in “this, mother, and breathe,” and the harder-sounding, “unvoiced” one in “thanks, nothing, and mouth.” (By “voiced,” I mean that to make the “th” as in “the,” requires using your voice, whereas the other “th” sound does not.) First, there’s the placement issue: No one wants to be seen sticking their tongue out of their mouths. Add to that the amount of times one or the other or both “th” sounds occur in a typical conversation, and it really seems cruel and unusual punishment -- especially the hard (“thanks”) “th” sound, perhaps because of the extra air required to push the sound through the front teeth.

And though I can live with a “z” being substituted for the “th” in say, “mother,” I do not like “f” being substituted for “th” in “something,” “nothing,” and “anything.” So I exert a little more pressure for students on that point, often with one forced viewing of 12-year-old Oliver in the 1969 movie “Oliver!” singing “I’d Do Anything” – a particularly painful rendition, even for this lover of American musicals.

For further practice of the hard (“thanks”) th sound, I have devised sentences like, “He is thin but he has thick skin” (and for the French, the sentence has that “h” problem too);” and “I think he thought about nothing,” which often prompts howls of protests. The thing is, it’s not that people can’t say these TH sounds – it’s more the effort and embarrassment of doing it -- it just feels so unnatural for non-native speakers.

Occasionally, I give students some well-appreciated, verbal relief: take the words, “clothes,” “months,” and “asked.” All of these have tricky consonant sounds next to a “z,” “s” or “t” sound. And I’ve realized that even we native speakers take certain shortcuts: For “clothes,” we skip the “th” all together and pronounce the word, “kloze;” for “months,” we say “munts,” and for the past tense of “ask” we say often just say “ast.” The reason is that the final sound is the important one, and not the deleted inner consonants.

So to everyone out there trying to speak a new language, just remember that those tongue-twisting sounds are universal – no one is spared. And for those of you with TH-troubles, you’ll just have to develop a sick skin – and some day you’ll sank me for zat.

Is Bad Language Good?

2010-12-11T11:26:00.005-05:00

Swearing, or using crude or bleep-worthy words, is rare for The Language Lady. So this afternoon, when I found myself happily singing the catchy chorus, “F--- You!” to hip-hopster Cee Lo Green’s amusing current hit song of the same name, I wondered if bad language in everyday English had reached a new phase.

The current profusion of profanity heard and seen everywhere has acquired its own sort of WikiLeak transparency, where no feeling is held back, no vulgar word replaced by a neutral one. The rebellious Sixties seem to have been the starting point for knocking down the invective barriers – and now, here we are in the 21st century, with a woman of few expletives walking around singing the F-word.

What’s going on here? Or in contemporary parlance: WTF*?

*(Spoiler Alert: Due to the nature of this subject, The Language Lady will be using non-asterixed swear words – in the name of scholarship – in this article. Just so you know.)

Bad Language – i.e., those naughty, generally four-letter, Anglo-Saxon words signifying some sort of religious curse or bodily function; and also words that are not curses per se, but coarse words for body parts and the like – has traditionally been discouraged in so-called polite society. But polite society these days seems to be aggressively lenient, with vulgarities leaching into the kitchen, carpool, schoolyard, store dressing rooms, office cubicles, and executive suites. Face it: Have you ever said, or has any child in the last 25 years heard the phrase, “Say that again and I’ll wash your mouth out with soap?” How very retro!

So, is this a good thing – this openness? Have we won the Cause for Coarseness, or is it just an unimpeded lack of imagination?

Swear words now seemed to be used 1) for (The Traditional) quick, emotional reaction to pain, fright, or frustration; 2) to sound edgy and fun; 3) to add grit and emotion; 4) to describe something quickly, with sufficient disdain. All that means opportunity-aplenty.

But where all that was once mostly just spoken (or with ironic bleeps on TV) it is appearing more and more in print: of course, books do it; blogs do it; and even the venerable literary magazine, The New Yorker, has been allowing expletives into its fiction for years.

And now the word “ass” seems to be going mass-market – such as in recent billboard ads – ones up on high poles, looming over streets and highways, for Levis blue jeans: “Not all asses were created equal;” and the big, block-letter poster from K-Swiss sports that claims, “Tubes: So light they make your socks feel like a couple of fat asses.” I have no idea what socks have to do with my rear end, but it got my attention.

Of course, the f-word usage award goes to the British clothes company, FCUK, which started out in 1972 as “French Connection”. In 2001, they started branding their clothes, “fcuk” -- or, “French Connection United Kingdom” (wink, wink) and played on the resulting controversy with a t-shirt line with all kinds of slogans like, "fcuk this", "hot as fcuk", "mile high fcuk", "too busy to fcuk", etc.

Swear words have existed as long as language – the word “swear” has prehistoric, Indo-European roots; and a recent study has revealed that swearing actually relieves pain -- meaning that our evolution as humans includes outbursts of four-letter words.

“People need special words to convey emotion,” according to author and linguistics professor Deborah Tannen. “For those who use them, swear words are linked to emotion in a visceral way.”

The website, “How Stuff Works” explains that swear words came from the ancient belief that spoken words have power. “Some cultures,” the site says, “especially ones that have not developed a written language, believe that spoken words can curse or bless people or can otherwise affect the world. This leads to the idea that some words are either very good or very bad.”

But without the social taboo that once limited the use of vulgar language, modern, everyday English just sounds filthy. Not that that’s a bad thing, according to linguist John McWhorter, who sees all this nasty language as the natural outcome of a progressively informal society -- one that’s intent on breaking taboos and showing real life in all its crass glory:

“In a hatless America of T-shirts and visible underwear,” McWhorter says, “where what were once written speeches are now baggy ‘talks’ and we barely flinch to see nudity and simulated copulation in movies, what would be strange is if people weren’t increasingly comfortable using cuss words in public.”

But is this fun, funny, or cool? Isn’t suggestion funnier or more interesting? Think about it: What is sexier – seeing a big-chested woman in a tight t-shirt with a hint of cleavage, or seeing that same lady topless? Ok, after the initial shock – THEN what? Same goes for words.

Well, there is apparently still some ambivalence toward all this lax, earthy language. Witness the recent passing of two “sh*ts” in the proverbial night: that is, two industries (entertainment and financial) in opposing camps on the use of s-word usage – and it’s effect on business. Let’s take a look:

This past fall CBS premiered a new show called, “$#*! My Dad Says,” a comedy about the relationship between a crotchety, foul-mouthed dad and his twenty-something son. The show is based on the best-selling book, “Shit My Dad Says,” which was based on the author’s real-life twitter feed of the same name. And most of the stuff the dad says includes the s-word; stuff like: 'You don't know shit, and you're not shit. Don't take that the wrong way, that was meant to cheer you up." Or, “Son, no one gives a shit about all the things your cell phone does. You didn't invent it, you just bought it. Anybody can do that."

The popularity of the show, book, and Twitter feed clearly show mass acceptance of the s-word as “entertainment” – understandably, the s-word sounds edgier, more fun, and definitely more “real” than “STUFF My Dad Says” would have. And the TV show’s use of the symbols as substitutes for the s-word makes it look funny too – though the crassness of the original title is still there; however, since CBS is doing the show, no actual four-letter words have been used in the scripts. As for the show itself, film site Collider.com said, “Find out the real reason why $#*! is not only the title, but an apt description of the series …”

All this visual-verbal crassness might have pleased George Carlin, the late comedian known for his sharp, black humor, and who back in 1972 delivered the famous monologue, “Seven Words You Can Never Say on TV.” Carlin might now take indirect credit for the TV show title.

And Carlin might also take equal pride in the recent televised Senate investigation hearing into Goldman Sachs trades in the mortgage business, when the word “sh**ty” – not even bleeped out -- was read repeatedly by the Senate committee head grilling the traders:

“Boy, that Timberwolf was one shitty deal,” Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich) said, reading from a Goldman internal memo from a head trader to a fellow colleague; “shitty” described a certain deal, one worth millions of dollars, that the big investment firm had just transacted for a client. Senator Levin read the line each time he took a trader to task. This phrase was then copied in all media forms in news stories about that day’s hearing. Today, googling the words, “goldman shitty deal” brings up 827,000 responses.

It seems Goldman Sachs did not enjoy having its name tied to such a vulgar word: a July 29 article in the Wall Street Journal, titled, “George Carlin never would've cut it at the new Goldman Sachs,” reported that the firm had recently installed screening software to roust such vulgarities – even those with asterisks -- from all future company emails, calling that word, and others of that ilk, “unprofessional.” Let it be known, the WSJ added, “There will never be another s— deal at Goldman Sachs.”

It’s noteworthy that this multi-billion dollar firm sees bad language as bad for business. (Or maybe Goldman just wanted bad words to sound more reprehensible than questionable deals.) Could this mean the pendulum is starting to swing the other way?

I doubt it.

Everyday expressions are ever more gritty: “It sucks” has replaced “that’s too bad;” and “crappy” is the new “lousy.” There is a website called “absofuckinlutely,” which is actually pretty funny (people write in about their bad days); and even a hamburger joint on the Upper West Side claims sports a sign out front claiming it has “the best effin burgers in the city.”

Effin A!

Many people use the f-word as an adjective just to help describe some ordinary activity (“I can’t hang out now – got too much f**kin’ sh*t to do”), which they might think sounds tough, but actually seems lame. For some of those f-word users, it is a habit – like adding “like” or “y’know” -- they hardly seem aware they’re saying it. One of the crudest expressions, not in words so much as a visual turn of phrase, is used to express surprise at having accomplished something: “Boy, I really pulled that one out of my ass!” Yuck! Why not pour wet sewage all over the accomplishment.

Ultimately, bad language is offensive and shows a certain verbal lack of control – like word farts, if you will. Bad language goes along with our impatient, stressed- out society, one that’s caffeinated and on the run; we’re a society that enjoys breaking rules and taboos, and being a little out of control; And we’re all about choice – so we can all make our own verbal choices out of annoyance, anger, or just because -- and few will stand in our way.

When I was about ten and beginning to let slip a few nasty epithets in gym class, but well before my more linguistically coarse teen years, my dad gave me some advice: “Don’t swear unless you really mean it. When it’s not that important, just say ‘Beans!’” Beans?! No, Dad was not kidding. Though I never heard Dad say “Beans!” himself, he did seem to only swear once a year – the day he’d put our motorboat in the lake and try to start it up after the winter. And even then, he only swore at the motor, not at us kids.

Mom was equally good about not swearing. In fact, to this day, the only time I’ve ever heard her swear was one morning in middle school when I dropped the bacon on the floor (not the plate – just the 8 pieces of bacon, which broke into bits) and a “Damn!” thudded out of her mouth. And it’s still ringing in my ears.

So there is something to be said for holding back -- it makes the select moments more memorable and keeps ordinary air less verbally polluted. Besides, finding a way around swearing requires more ingenuity than letting it all hang out. Compare, for example, excerpts from Cole Porter’s 1928 hit, “Let’s Do It” and Cee Lo Green’s “Fuck You” (2010):

“LET’S DO IT” (1928):

And that's why birds do it, bees do it
Even educated fleas do it
Let's do it, let's fall in love;

Cold Cape Cod clams, 'gainst their wish, do it
Even lazy jellyfish do it
Let's do it, let's fall in love

I've heard that lizards and frogs do it
Lyin' on a rock;
They say that roosters do it
With a doodle and cock

Some Argentines, without means do it
I hear even Boston beans do it
Let's do it, let's fall in love.

VS.

“FUCK YOU” (2010)
I see you driving 'round town
With the girl i love and i'm like,
Fuck you!

Oo, oo, ooo

I guess the change in my pocket
Wasn't enough, i'm like,
Fuck you!
And fuck her too!

I said, if i was richer, i'd still be witch-ya
Ha, now ain't that some shit? (ain't that some shit?)

And although there's pain in my chest
I still wish you the best with a...

Fuck you!
Oo, oo, ooo.

Times change. Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It” is still clever, and in alluding to the big thing that we all do, it was positively risqué -- back in 1928, not in 2010. Cee Lo’s song takes a lighthearted tune while keeping in the gritty reality of love, letting listeners sing expletively away --

And George Carlin must be smiling down from his place in No Holds Barred Heaven, and singing with satisfaction, “F**k youuu!”

Troubled in Translation

2010-09-04T16:09:00.000-04:00

There is a memorable bar scene (Note: Potential Spoiler Alert!) in Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds,” where a German SS major, seated at a table with some other soldiers, asks for three glasses of scotch; the fellow Nazi he’s sitting next to helpfully flashes three fingers to the bartender. But when the major sees the Nazi’s hand gesture, he is jarred: The soldier has just given himself away. “You,” the major says through his teeth, “are no more German than the scotch” --

The tip off? The way the soldier made the number “3” with his fingers – the pointer, middle, and ring fingers standing tall, which is the American way; while a German or any European would have held up thumb, pointer, and middle fingers, ring and pinky folded down.

The English version of the current Swedish bestseller, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” (the first book of the 3-book Millenium series) had many such jarring moments for me. “This sentence is not English,” I would think, as I read a random paragraph in the 600-plus page novel. The word choice or word order were either slightly off or waaay off, forcing me to reach for a pencil and wonder why the publishers had apparently hired a non-native speaker of English to translate.

The mystery-thriller’s sloppy punctuation and awkward phrasing started on Page 1, but I did not take that to mean the translator was foreign – just bad. It was not until Page 189 (of the small paperback edition) that the unintended mystery of the translator’s nationality became a leit-motif for me as I read:

“Did other people live at that time on the farm?” the text says.

Can you hear the mistake? Perhaps it’s subtle but the mistake is nonetheless non-English. It’s like saying, “He walked on Friday to work,” which is perfectly understandable and yet the natural way to say that is, “He walked to work on Friday.” English syntax, that is, basic English word order, puts “Place” before “Time.” (I discuss word order in my blog from January 2007, “Your Word Order, Please: http://thelanguagelady.blogspot.com/2007_01_01_archive.html)

As I continued, I started finding more “clues” that the translator was probably, (my assumption based on the book’s origin) Swedish. I flipped to the cover page and found that it was translated by Reg Keeland – a name that could be foreign, or not; and which could belong to a male or female, though I pictured a man. Here are some more examples that seem to give away Mr. Keeland’s nationality:

Page 208: “I’m just so damn sick of the whole story. It’s poisoned our lives for decades, and it doesn’t stop doing so.”

“… it doesn’t stop doing so” should be “it HASN’T stopped doing so.” Explaining how to use the present perfect tense – as in, “I have written -- is one of the most difficult aspects of teaching English to non-native speakers; basically, the present perfect tense is used to express an action that started in the past that still relates to now. In the above case, a native English speaker/translator would have used this tense instinctively; however, other Western languages don’t have this tense at all (at least to the extent we use it in English) and generally use the present tense to express time passage: “I am here four years,” instead of “I have been here for four years.”

Then there was the word “judgement,” sprinkled throughout the book and spelled with an “e” each time. This is the British way of spelling the word – Noah Webster dropped the “e” for Americans when he took the “u” out of “color,” around 1828 (from “Common Errors in English Usage” by Paul Brian); and since many Europeans learn British English in school, no doubt our Swedish translator was among them.

Page 248: “She had a rudimentary knowledge of the law – it was a subject she had never had occasion to explore – and her faith in the police was generally exiguous.”

Exiguous? Any translator who knows the vocabulary limits of his/her English-speaking readership, would never have put that word in that sentence. Exiguous? I’ve never heard of it -- never come across it, not even in old SAT practice sheets. But no doubt Herr Keeland found the word in his Swedish-English dictionary, and with the word’s Latin-sounding pomposity, it must have seemed an intelligent choice. But one blissfully nice thing about English is how it generally avoids Latin-sounding pomposity – and a better translation would have been, “and her faith in the police was meager, at best.”

Pages 319-320 have so many mistakes, I can almost see the poor Swede’s head bowed down on his computer keyboard in exasperation. There are problems with word order, word usage, and verb tense; and the passage in general has an awkwardness that just does not sound English. See if you agree:

“Gottfriend’s cabin … was the place to which Harriet and Martin’s father had retreated when his marriage to Isabella was going to the dogs in the late fifties … And here was also the place that Harriet had been to so often that it was one of the first in which they looked for her. Vanger had told him that during her last year, Harriet had gone often to the cabin, apparently to be in peace on weekends or holidays.”

First, “to which” and “in which” sound formal and strange – we just don’t use that construction unless absolutely necessary, and it wasn’t necessary. Secondly, the phrases, “here was also the place” and “Harriet had gone often” sound so distinctly foreign (adverb choice and placement, suffice it to say); the phrase “in peace” is not quite right, and then there is the strange, “… going to the dogs in the late fifties.” Here’s how I would have phrased it:

“Gottfriend’s cabin was … where Harriet and Martin’s father had retreated in the late fifties when his marriage to Isabella was going to the dogs … The cabin was also the place Harriet had been to so often, it was one of the first places they had looked for her. Vanger told him that during Harriet’s last year, she had often gone there on weekends or holidays to find some peace and quiet.”

But Mr. Keeland’s true “3-Finger” moment came with this, on Page 389:

“Norsjö was a small town with one main street, appropriately enough called Storgatan …”

Appropriately enough? Why was the main street, “Storgatan,” so “appropriately” named? Well, if you’re a Swedish translator and you forget for a moment that your English audience does not automatically know that “Storgatan” means “Main Street,” then yes – the name was perfectly appropriate.

The big surprise for me came on Page 644, the book’s final page, when I googled “Reg Keeland” and discovered that he is, in fact, an American man named Steven T. Murray, apparently the go-to guy for Scandinavian translations. He used a pseudonym for all three of the Millenium series books due to a “miscommunication” with the English publisher, who demanded the manuscripts before Murray had had a chance to edit his translation. So that may excuse, or at least explain, the muddled text, still mired somewhere between the original Swedish and unpolished English.

Slack editing aside, the book has taken the publishers (and translator too, no doubt) all the way to the bank. To be fair, though, I found the second book much improved. Appropriately enough.

Translations: Faithful or Fluent?

2010-08-17T01:10:00.001-04:00

Anyone who has graced the inside of a bookstore in the past few months will no doubt have seen the display of the international, smash-hit trilogy from Sweden, “Men Who Hate Women,” “Flicken Som Lekte Med Eldren,” and “The Air Castle that Blew Up,” also called The Milliennium Series. You guessed it -- these are not the titles you’ll find at Barnes and Noble. You may recognize them as “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” “The Girl Who Played with Fire,” and “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.”

Translating books from one language into another is not an exact science, as shown by the differences between the above titles. And when a book is gobbled up by 30 million people in 40 countries, as this has been, there are bound to be differences between what makes sense – and more importantly, what sells – in one country, versus another. So, though translators can take credit for being an indirect part of the publishing phenomenon, so can book marketers. The author of the series, the late Swedish journalist, Stieg Larssen (who died of a heart attack at age 50, in 2004, just months before seeing any of this amazing success) gave his first book the title, “Men Who Hate Women,” which underscores one of the series’ core themes; however, I can just hear the book’s American marketer at the meeting:

Marketer: The title has to go -- stores will probably stick it in Psychology next to ‘Men are From Mars, Women are from Venus.”

Larssen’s agent: But Stieg wanted this title! It’s what he wanted to say about --

Marketer: But that title won’t sell. We need something with … with mystery, and something “now,” something hip -- body piercings or tattoos or -- anything. Men hating women is so Seventies. No, it’s gotta be something about The Girl.

And the rest is history (well, recent history). But the result was that though some countries chose to be faithful to the original, “Men Who Hate Women,” plenty of others sided with “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”

So, having read “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” myself, I checked out a few of the translated titles from around the world (thank you, Google Translator), and here’s what I found:

“MEN WHO HATE WOMEN” VS. “THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO”

The French title, “Les hommes qui n’aimaient pas les femmes,” or “Men who didn’t like women,” followed the Swedish in spirit, differing only in verb choice and tense. What struck me about the French title, though, was how it showed what many of my French students do – which is to say what something is NOT, rather than what it is. For example, a French person seems often more inclined to say, “It is not sunny today,” rather than, “It’s cloudy today.” So it follows that French would “not like” women over “hating” them – never mind the qualitative difference between the two emotions.

And yet the Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese followed the French, though choosing the more amorous “did not LOVE,” over “did not LIKE”, as in “Los hombres que no amaban a las mujeres,” and “Os Homens Que Não Amavam as Mulheres.” or “Men who did not love women.” I wondered if the “didn’t like/didn’t love* construction were particular to Latin-based languages, but the Italians (“Uomini che odiano le donne”) and the Portuguese from Portugal (“Os Homens que Odeiam as Mulheres”) went with “Men Who Hate Women.”

Another curious thing about the “did not like/did not love” construction is why the verb tense is in the past (imperfect) tense in these three Latin-root languages. The Swedish title is in the present tense – indicating a regular, routine activity, as in Men Who (always) Hate Women. Perhaps by putting the verb tense in the imperfect (which gives a sense of continuity in the past – more like, “Men who never liked/loved women; or men who used to never like/love women), the French, Spanish, and Portuguese reader can better sense that these are certain men and certain women in a certain time, as in a novel – as opposed to men in everyday life who routinely hate women.

And while the Finnish are reading “Men Who Hate Women” -- “Miehet jotka vihaavat naisia,” the Russians are trying a unique marketing strategy, with the first three words of the “Dragon” title in English, followed by the Cyrillic “Tattoowirovki Drakon-na,” as in "The Girl With The татуировки дракона". The Icelandic and Greek titles also did a little mix-and-match with: "The Girl með The Dragon Tattoo" and "Το Κορίτσι Με Το Dragon Tattoo."

Interrupting this neat little divide between “Men” and “Dragon” are the German titles (for Germany, Austria, Switzerland, etc.), which dispensed with “The Girl” theme entirely and went with, “Verblendung,” “Verdamnis,” and “Vergebung” for the three books: “The Blinding (or ‘Blending-in’),” “The Damnation,” and “Forgiveness (or “Redemption”).” Though Stieg Larsson may be rolling in his grave with these titles (they seem to suggest the outcome to each book), the alliteration of the titles is probably a book marketer’s dream.

Translations have always wreaked verbal havoc, or prompted many a laugh or cringe. Anyone who’s every sat through a movie with subtitles can relate. I mean, how do you translate Humphrey Bogart saying, “Here’s looking at you, kid,” to his long-lost love, Ingrid Bergman in “Casablanca”? The French went with “à votre santé,” or “to your health,” even using the formal “your” – which not only seems stiff but so very un-Bogart. Maybe French audiences swoon when they read this line, as Bogart lifts his champagne glass, that certain look in his eye. A literal – and impossible -- rendering might conjure up: “Voici te regarde, cherie,” which would leave Parisians howling either in laughter or in pain at such mangling. (Maybe it does not even matter what Bogie says – his look may say it all.)

Being both faithful and fluent to the original text is an ideal not often achieved, except through luck, if both languages happen to have similar constructions or at least similar ways of conveying the same idiom or expression. The 17th-century French philosopher and writer, Gilles Menage, known in his time as a cultivator of wit and elegant conversation, thought the combination of faithful and fluent was “like women – either beautiful or faithful, but not both.” (Ah, zose French!)

The Language Lady’s next blog will look inside the pages of the English translation of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” to see just how faithful and fluent – or not – the translator was. As I read “Dragon,” I found quite a few oddly worded passages, which had me guessing as to the translator’s nationality the whole way through, with the answer (googled as I hit the final page) almost as much a surprise as the actual ending. A votre santé, kids.

Finding Out About Phrasal Verbs

2010-02-28T23:54:00.001-05:00

(When you see an * in the text, it means the two or three words next to it make up a “phrasal verb.”)

One of the most difficult aspects of English for foreign students to master is something we native speakers of English rarely even think about* or hear of*: phrasal verbs. On my shelf of books about English is a hefty volume entitled, “NTC’s Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs and Other Idiomatic Verbal Phrases.” There are more than 12,000 such entries in this tome. True, some entries are idioms (colorful expressions). But what ARE these phrasal verbs? Read on* and find out*!

Phrasal verbs – among the most basic phrases and expressions in our language -- take one base verb then add a word ‘particle’ (looks like a preposition but doesn’t operate like one grammatically) to express a certain meaning. A two-year-old can use phrasal verbs: “Pick me up” or “Go out now?” Even my cat understands “Get down!” or “Come in.” (That is, he seems to, though he’s better at “come in” than “get down.”)

The base verb alone, however, does not do the job; it’s the little particle that makes all the difference. Use the wrong particle – like “put OFF” instead of “put ON” and you either make no sense, or have said the opposite of what you meant to say. Such a small slip explains why most foreign languages use completely different verbs – like the French “chercher” for “look for,” and “regarder” for “look at” -- whereas English speakers just switch a little word.

Some phrasal verb particles are directional: sit down; stand up; go out; look up. But others create a meaning larger than the word’s regular use: take “off” for instance. If I take something “off” a shelf, I remove it. But if I walk, storm, run, or drive “off,” then I remove myself far into the distance and out of sight.

Think of* “turn” “turn around,” “turn in” “turn into” “turn in on,” etc. -- each one requiring a separate definition. This could make you turn against* English!

Think about* the difference between “cleaning” your room and “cleaning out” your room. Or “writing” a message and “writing down” a message.

And try explaining why “wind up” and “wind down” can mean the same thing.

Yet despite these intricacies, native speakers of English – even the most illiterate or grammar-phobic – rarely (if ever) make mistakes with phrasal verbs (or the phrasal nouns and adjectives derived from them).

There is so much to say about phrasal verbs, it makes me realize how concise that 12,000-entry phrasal verb dictionary actually is. But rather than risk losing readers with my enthusiasm for the subject, I will instead cut to* the inspiration for this blog - a recent letter to the Language Lady from Renee, an English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher in New York, who writes:

“Dear Language Lady,

One of my colleagues is teaching phrasal verbs and ran across* "find out" vs "find out about." Our whole troupe of teachers is stumped: We can't figure out* why it's “find out” the rules, but “find out about” volunteering. Both rules and volunteering are nouns so why do we need the preposition for one but not the other? (the two **added by The Language Lady)

Can you help?”

Thanks for asking, Renee.

The key here is the word, “about,” which means “concerning; in regard to;” “referring to different sides or aspects of something.”

The phrasal verb, “to find out” means to search and confirm or discover (“discover” is too big a word for the act, really, but it’s the closest either the dictionary or I could get) the answer to something fairly straightforward or already written down: We “find out,” for example, what the homework is; what time a movie starts; a person’s last name; and, as Renee asked, “the rules,” which given the context, are presumably ones already ones set down and recorded.

“To find out ABOUT” something changes the meaning; “about” implies that there is something bigger than a simple answer to confirm or discover. If someone asked you to “find out about” someone’s last name, you might look into* the name’s ethnic origin, meaning, change or spelling, etc. to uncover various elements “concerning,” “in regard to,” or “about” the name. So to “find out about” volunteering would involve several calls or queries to see how to go about* it, what choices there are, whom to contact, etc. In other words, finding out about something entails more than a pre-determined fact or answers, but a larger scope of different things to think about* or consider.

Just one more thing: why Renee is right when she says that both “rules” and “volunteering” are nouns. “Volunteering,” in the context of finding out about it, is a “gerund” – that is, a noun formed from a verb. And when a verb form follows a preposition (or phrasal verb particle), it almost always takes a gerund. This is why we say “to look forward to _______ing” (seeing, doing, meeting, etc.) or “from _______ing (listening, talking, running, etc.). To find out “about” something requires a gerund as well – hence, “volunteering.”

So keep on* coming up with* excellent questions and The Language Lady will happily follow up* and get back to* you.

St. Jude’s Gives No Thanks to Parallel Structure

2010-01-26T21:44:00.001-05:00

While out Christmas shopping last month I noticed a small, green card at my local Ann Taylor store. It was from the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, and it featured a beaming but bald child as part of its admirable outreach to raise money for children with cancer. I picked it up and read, “Give thanks for the healthy kids in your life, and give to those who are not.”

Hmmmm. Another case of some institution verbally mangling an ad campaign (see Language Lady’s “Citibank,” 12/31/09).

Of course, I knew what the card was TRYING to say, but there was something about the wording that was not quite natural – something amiss; speaking of which, a few days later I saw a youthful- if not exactly natural-looking, 72-year-old Marlo Thomas, deliver this same message on TV: “Give thanks for the healthy children in your life,” the St. Jude spokesperson said, adding in her vaguely croaky, “That Girl”-ish voice, “and give to those who are not.”

Oh, Marlo – can’t you hear that awkward syntax?

Apparently not. This was the sixth year of the research hospital’s “Thanks and Giving” campaign – big posters, small cards, TV ads, all asking us holiday shoppers to give, in effect, to ‘the HEALTHY kids who are NOT in our lives.’

I realize that is not what Marlo Thomas meant, and that most people understand the message: that we should be grateful for the healthy kids in our life, and to give money (via St. Jude) to sick kids.

Given that St. Jude’s foremost goal is to find a cure for childhood cancer, this is an understandable, and well-intentioned request. But the message is a mess.

The copywriter attempted to use a parallel construction, like Julius Caesar’s, “I came; I saw; I conquered.” See how each part repeats the structure of the one before? Julius is clear, strong, and concise – nice!

Twenty-year-old songstress Taylor Swift uses parallel construction in her current hit, “You Belong to Me,” when she sings: “She wears short shorts -- I wear T-shirts … She wears high heels – I wear sneakers.” Such parallel construction provides clear contrast between two statements.

St. Jude’s attempted contrasting statements, loosely interpreted, are: “Give thanks for healthy kids; give money to sick kids.” The trouble is, actually writing that sounds too crass. So the copywriter softened it up – but in doing so, he came up with two statements that have different grammatical structures – thus misaligning the key contrast between “healthy” and “sick”.

Tweaking for parallel structure (not meaning) would render the phrase as:

“Give thanks for the healthy kids in your life, and give to those unhealthy kids who are not in your life.” This makes no sense – but it’s at least parallel.

When taken apart bit by bit, the slogan’s flaws become clear:

• “Give thanks for the healthy kids in your life,”

The structure is Subject (an understood “you,” who should be giving), Verb (Give), Direct Object (thanks), Indirect Object (Kids – technically, object of the preposition “for” but in the bigger scheme, “kids” are the indirect object of someone’s giving), and the adjective phrase, “in your life,” modifying kids.

• “… and give to those who are not.”

Subject (understood “you”), Verb (“give”) --- and there the symmetry stops.

There is no direct object, and the indirect object, ”those,” refers to the “healthy kids” mentioned in the first part; and “who are not” corresponds to “in your life.”

But given that this campaign has been going since 2004 and I seem to be the only one whining in the syntactical wilderness, St Jude’s should give thanks to grammatically forgiving (or unaware) donors.

Still – why not try to say it right:

“Give thanks to the children in your life who are healthy, and give to those who are not.”

Citibank "Commits to Improve"

2009-12-31T23:56:00.002-05:00

It’s the last day of 2009 – a strange year, one that started with all kinds of banks collapsing, merging, converging, and coming back from the brink. It seems like the worst is over – phew! So it’s not surprising that one of the bigger banks, Citibank (and my bank, it so happens), has recently launched a new campaign to re-gain or re-affirm customer confidence. Yet I’m stuck with this thought:

Is it possible to trust a bank that can’t even get a makeover-style marketing effort grammatically correct? Here’s Citibank’s new slogan:

“We commit to improve.” Pardon me? The Language Lady’s pen froze on her deposit slip when she caught sight of that one.

The big promotion – printed in bold blue letters against a white background – from wallet-sized cards to big posters hanging in branch windows makes a list of various worthy but vague promises like, “We promise to be there when you need us” and is summed up at the end with, “We Commit To Improve.”

Perhaps some of you readers are thinking, “So …?” But say it out loud: doesn’t it sound odd? You wouldn’t say, “We’re committing to improve,” would you? Or “We have committed to improve.” Of course not. Saying “We commit to improve” (IMPROVE, of all things!) is the verbal equivalent of trying to gain someone’s trust by holding out a filthy hand.

The slogan is wrong on so many grammatical levels:

• First, “improve” should be “improving” – that is, “We commit to improving.” Whenever we commit, we commit to some THING, and a THING falls into the “noun” category. There is a type of noun formed from the root of a verb + ing, and this is called a gerund. You can say, “We commit to better health” (better health = a thing) and thus, “We commit to improving (also a thing), though still not a great sentence. Here’s why:

• Look at that verb tense in “We commit” Anyone who read my “You Lie! (No, You’re Lying)” blog of October 5, 2009, will recall that using the present simple tense (“I speak,” “you lie,” etc.) is for facts or repeated actions. When we are in the act or process of doing something (and Citibank is in the process of improving) we use the continuous tense (“I’m speaking,” “you’re lying,” etc.) So Citibank’s saying “We commit” should contain a suggestion that they do this on a regular basis, like: “We always commit to improving;” or “We commit to improving on every Wednesday.” A “We commit” all by itself sounds as unnatural as South Carolina’s Senator Joe Wilson shouting out, “You lie!” to President Obama,; however, Language Lady readers have pointed out that Senator Wilson’s outburst was in acceptable Southern dialect -- but Citibank cannot claim the same.

• “Commit” can take the active voice when what is being committed is some external thing: “We are committing funds to this project.” But when describing a personal commitment, we use the passive voice: “I am committed to this relationship;” “she is committed to her job.” Citibank’s use of “commit” is wrong: although they are trying to convey personal commitment, they are using the wrong voice:

What Citibank meant to say was, “We are committed to improving.”

I know this year has been one of cutbacks and lay-offs. So is what happened here a case of Ed from Accounting being yanked from his cubicle to replace the recently laid-off Anne in Communications? How did this slogan fall through the editorial cracks like that? And is my money going to fall through similar financial cracks? Well??

Grammatical competence is a form of competence – and if a bank can’t be outwardly competent, then what? It’s possible to see what’s at risk here for 2010:

Citibank’s shoddy slogan wreaks havoc with consumer confidence, and the subsequent run on the bank spurs a domino effect in the entire banking system and it’s …. 2009 all over again.

Happy New Year!!

A Question of “Of”

2009-12-13T13:48:00.002-05:00

The Language Lady is always eager to answer readers’ questions. Today, I am printing a recent question from a reader, “Danny,” in California, who wants to know about that potentially tricky word, “of”:

Danny: It's widely agreed among linguists that "of" is superfluous in phrases such as "that long OF a game" or "not that handsome OF an actor" or "too big OF a task."

The rule I derive from this is that when "of" follows an adjective in such situations, it's superfluous.

But how about when "of" follows "much," as in "it wasn't much of a game" or "too much of a challenge"? If "much" in those phrases is an adjective, does it "violate" the rule? Or is it an idiomatic exception to the rule? Or in those cases is it not an adjective at all, but a noun?

The Language Lady: The short answer to your question, Danny, is: Yes!

That is, “much,” as in “It wasn’t much of a game,” is a pronoun; more specifically, a pronoun complement, which means that “It” and “much” refer to each other. (That’s why saying, “This is she,” is correct when you answer the phone (unless you’re a guy and you say, “This is HE.”) And in the sentence, “That was not much of a game,” the prepositional phrase, “of a game,” modifies “much.”

The other sentence, “He is not that good of an actor,” is – as suspected – wrong. It should be, “He is not that good an actor.” (OR: He is not much of an actor.)

The reason is, the prepositional phrase, “of an actor” is trying unsuccessfully to modify the adjective, “good.” But prepositional phrases cannot modify adjectives – only nouns or pronouns: a street IN London; the building ON the corner, a friend OF mine, etc.

In the above sentence, “good” describes both “He” AND “actor.” (These are all subject “complements,” since they all refer to each other.) Any “of” – as you said -- would be superfluous, tacked onto the wrong part of speech.

Which is why saying, “Not that big OF a deal” is so cringe-worthy. It should either be “Not that big a deal” or “No big deal.”

If I Were in the (Subjunctive) Mood

2009-12-13T13:34:00.000-05:00

Dear Language Lady, I’m not a language guy per se and certainly not a grammar guru, but since I do write, I am mindful of usage – past and present. I am thus curious about your take on “If I was you” vs “If I were you”. As I understand it, this is the subjunctive mood (designating contingency rather than fact) and is thus correctly stated as, “If I were you”.

The sentence “I was acting as if I were you” uses both the regular past tense and the subjunctive.

-- Gerry (Canada)

Dear Gerry –

You’re a language guy to me if you can spot your English subjunctive! I was given a thorough grounding in grammar in elementary and middle school, but I still did not learn about the English subjunctive until I took foreign languages in high school and college. Even then, “If I was you” and “If I were you” both sounded right to my ears.

The reason both are used is due to basic language change: that is, it seems that teachers stopped teaching the English subjunctive decades ago – even before they stopped teaching English grammar all together 30-plus years ago. So the older generation continued saying, “If I were you,” while the younger generation began saying, “If I was you,” since no one explained the subjunctive rules to them. And when enough people say something for a long enough period, then that too becomes standard, acceptable English – even if it still seems “wrong.” Language, as with all things, changes (alas).

The textbook, “Grammar In Use”/Intermediate by British linguist Raymond Murphy, Cambridge University Press, 2007, which I use -- and love – for my English as a Second Language students, accepts both forms. On a more grass roots level, googling “If I were you” elicits 356 million results, as opposed to “If I was you” -- and a whopping 2.6 billion! The people are clearly speaking.

For a good explanation of the English subjunctive, I recommend the site, EnglishClub.com. (Click on: englishclub.com/grammar/verbs-subjunctive.htm)
This site says that “If I were you” is correct in all situations, while “If I was you” is correct in informal, familiar situations. I’d like to think so too, but “if I was” and other forgotten-subjunctive occasions appear in writing (books, articles, etc) so often, the formal and informal situations are no longer clearly defined.

Historically, English has done a lot to get rid of the subjunctive, which is why it is so hard for us native speakers to learn how to use it in other languages. Meanwhile, Spanish, French, and Portuguese, for instance, use present and past subjunctive all the time – as in “What do you want me to say?” and “I hope you’ll be surprised;” or German, along with the others, jumps in on the subjunctive bandwagon with a sentence like, “If she had more time, she would write more grammar blogs.” Portuguese even uses the future subjunctive following “if” and “when” in instances like, “If you want, we can go,” and “When you arrive, we will eat,” etc. to express a future uncertainty.

English, meanwhile, just avoids all this language subtlety by mainly sticking with verbs that sound like our regular present and past tenses: “She hopes you will like the present” and “I wished you would open it now” would both take the subjunctive in Latin languages.

The English subjunctive still hanging on in two cases: one, is with what I call business-type, more formal verbs: insist, request, demand, recommend, suggest; even there it is only visible with the 3rd person singular, as in “My boss insists that everyone BRING a laptop (not: “that everyone brings”);” or “They requested that she SIT in the corner (not: that she sits).

The subjunctive is more clearly seen in such cases with the verb, “be”:

“I ask that you BE quiet (not: ”that you are”)”; “The president suggested that all be at the meeting on time.”

The other place the English subjunctive is still hanging on (albeit by the proverbial thread) is in the hypothetical case with “if” and “as if”: “If I had a million dollars …” “as If I knew the answer …” “If /as if she understood the problem,” etc. All of these hypothetical clauses take what sounds like past tense; however, it is really the past tense (“you” form) AS the subjunctive form.

This usage is more apparent with the verb “to be” – particularly, when used in phrases like, “If I were you;” and “He wishes she were here.”

For the moment, Gerry, you may proudly stick with your “If I were you” (I think it sounds more elegant) but simply refrain from correcting any friends or colleagues who say the other form – they’re correct, too – though I wish it weren’t/wasn’t so.

“YOU LIE!” (No, “You’re Lying!”)

2009-10-05T01:15:00.002-04:00

Perhaps you were watching President Obama’s speech on the evening of September 9, 2009 and heard (R-SC) Rep. Joe Wilson’s by now notorious, “You lie!” outburst. And even if you were not watching, you have probably at least read the subsequent news articles about it or caught the moment on YouTube. There have been many, many responses to this outburst but not one of them has remarked on how strange it is that a native-English-speaking American would shout out, “You lie!” and not, “You’re lying!”

Rep. Wilson claims that his outburst was spontaneous – but “You lie!” is simply not a natural tense for native speakers of English. “You lie” is in the present simple tense – the one we use for expressing facts or things done regularly: “I cook badly;” “She walks to work everyday.” “He lies when he’s stressed.”

When speaking of what we or someone else is doing at a particular moment, we use a tense called the present progressive (or continuous). Say you’re at the stove with raw meats, vegetables, and sauces in various pots and skillets and your spouse walks in and says, “Hi, honey – what’s up?” you’re not going to say, “I cook.” You would say, “I’m cooking.”

In that same way, “You lie” is a totally unnatural thing to say to another person when that person is still speaking: “You’re lying!” is what most of us would have said. (Or, as Whitney Houston is quoted as saying to Oprah Winfrey in this week’s National Enquirer, “You’re a liar!” Grammatically speaking, that is absolutely perfect.)

The difference between the present simple tense and present progressive is, respectively, as clear as the difference between “What do you do?” (i.e. for a living?) and “What are you doing?” (actively, now).

In his book, “Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue,” linguist John McWhorter goes to great lengths to show how English is distinguished from its Western European language counterparts (French, Spanish, German, Dutch, etc.) by this progressive tense – a Celtic influence not found on the Continent: the Celts were living in England when the West Germanic Saxon tribes overtook the island in the 6th century; the Celts then set about learning the language of the new Saxon rulers – bringing some structures of their own language into their adopted one.

That is why a “What’s up?” to someone in the kitchen in, say, New York or London prompts an “I’m cooking” answer; but the answer in Amsterdam, Berlin, Barcelona, or Paris would mostly likely be, when translated, “I cook.”

So, getting back to Joe Wilson and his so-called spontaneous outburst during the president’s speech before Congress on health care and other reforms: That evening, Obama had just finished saying, ““The reforms I am proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally,” when from the audience a voice yells out what we now know to be Wilson’s “You lie!” exclamation, but which is a bit unintelligible even on repeated viewings.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rw9lQT1Ark4&feature=related

In any case, there is no dispute that “You lie!” is what Wilson said. Still, my question remains: How could Wilson claim his “You lie!” outburst was spontaneous, when it is simply not a natural thing for any native speaker of English (and Wilson is) to say? Perhaps Wilson thought that “You lie” was better -- punchier, stronger-sounding -- than the more drawn out, “You’re lying.” If that is the case, then there would be at least a bit of premeditation there. And where there is premeditation, there is no spontaneity.

So from a purely grammatical point of view, Wilson’s excuse for his outburst rings, ironically, false.

Between You and I

2009-04-28T00:11:00.000-04:00

Between you and me, I think “between you and I” is giving way to everyday acceptance at a faster rate than the melting of the polar ice cap – and if that doesn’t make you cringe, then consider yourself part of that change. The rest of us are mere grammatical polar bears on an ever-shrinking base, at least where prepositions and object pronouns are concerned.

Specifically, I am talking about how it will soon be – or already is (except in grammar books) – generally acceptable to put an “I” where it technically should be “me.” Our own Harvard-educated president, who is also a lawyer, best-selling author, and someone generally acknowledged to be wonderfully articulate, has been quoted as saying, “it was a very personal decision for Michelle and I” and “the main disagreement with John and I.” The day before President Obama gave his first speech on the stimulus plan, half of the New York Times Op-Ed page was an article – mainly a defense -- of just this aspect of our Chief of State’s grammar. (See: “The I’s Have It,” Feb. 24, 2009.)

Standard, traditional grammar requires the object pronoun “me” to follow a preposition (in, for, to, by, with, etc.). Think about it: We say, “with me” -- so why say, “with Michelle and I”? To those of us brought up to admire and follow the logic and structure of grammar, breaking that particular rule has always been the linguistic equivalent of fingernails across an old slate blackboard. But the mere fact that I now have to explain what kind of board – the blackboard fast becoming obsolete, being replaced by the non-chill-inducing interactive whiteboard – also says something, however metaphorically, about language change.

And though this particular I-me switch has been around for decades, it has not been recognized as standard English. Even so, I figured a time would come when this confusion would be accepted into standard English, but I did not think it would be so soon. True, it is not in any grammar book now, but I am sensing An Inconvenient Grammatical Truth that I’m not sure even Al Gore can stop – because I’m not even sure if Al Gore knows the grammatical rule himself. Which is the whole point:

Knowing the standard form of English or any language is a practical thing -- a way to be understood by the majority of people, and along with that, a way to assimilate and move up the social ladder. Though some linguists have called the whole notion of standard English elitist and politically incorrect, this linguistic aspect of social mobility boils down to common sense: whether you’re a store manager or head of a global enterprise, you will probably hire the person you think will best be able to communicate with customers or clients.

Spoken standard English is also an unconscious preference, as witnessed most recently in the youtube sensation, Susan Boyle, who surprised over a 100 million viewers with her electrifying performance, singing “I Dreamed A Dream” on an American Idol-style British reality TV show audition. The most obvious part of the surprise was visual: this dowdy, middle-aged woman revealed a voice of startling youth and beauty. The other, more subtle surprise element was aural – in interviews before and after her singing, Ms. Boyle spoke in a plain, regional Scottish accent – nothing fancy, and sounding like a simple, middle-class woman. But her singing brought forth polished-sounding words flowing effortlessly out of her mouth in elegantly neutral-accented perfection; the live audience and panel erupted into cheers and standing ovations; youtube watchers worldwide got lumps in their throats and reached for tissues.

Foreigners who “do not speak well zee English” are usually given a little slack for grammatical errors; and many accents can be positively charming. But when you can’t understand a foreigner’s non-standard English, it is not so charming. Native speakers of English, who, let’s say, have heavy regional accents (like New Yawwk, Bahstn, or Southuhn) and who dot their sentences with “ain’t” or “youse” or double negatives like “He didn’t say nuttin’” are considered less educated and less socially refined. All else being equal among, say, job candidates, the person speaking standard English would be hired in a heartbeat over the other two.

But if President Obama thinks “with Michelle and I” sounds fine, what incentive does our fairly grammar-phobic population have to say, “with Michelle and me”? Because teaching English grammar in public school went out of fashion in the 1970s, most of today’s public school teachers never formally learned the subject themselves, nor are they required to teach it today. So at this point, confusing “me” and “I” is clearly not going to keep someone from being promoted at work, much less from holding the highest office in the land – just ask Bill Clinton, who was also heard to utter the occasional “with Hillary and I.”

Before too long I imagine that English grammar books will give readers an option – the traditional usage, and the new standard. In the English as a second language textbook, “Intermediate Grammar In Use” (University of Cambridge Press, 2008), author Raymond Murphy handles the rule regarding, “If I was you” vs. “If I were you” this way: both are fine. In this case, the original grammar rule was probably gradually over-ridden by so many people who did not know the original correct way to say it (“If I WERE you”), that the incorrect way gradually became standard as well. And so – sooner rather than later – I am betting that “I” will be okay, when following a preposition and another noun or pronoun before it.

Looking at how this works in other languages, it’s interesting to see that Spanish uses “me” directly after a preposition with no other people or pronouns, but changes to “I” when said with another person:

English Spanish

Come with me Ven conmigo (“migo” being the “me” suffix)

Come with Juan and I Ven con Juan y yo

French, meanwhile, keeps “me” as an object pronoun whether with just one person, or more; but the subject pronoun “I” becomes “me” when used with more than one person:

English French

He goes to school with me. Il va a l’ecole avec moi.

He goes to school with Jean and me. Il va a l’ecole avec Jean et moi.

(No change in “me” pronoun following preposition “avec”)

BUT

I go to school. Je vais a l’ecole.

Jean and me go to school. Jean et moi allons a l’ecole.

(Change occurs in the subject pronoun: “Je” – alone; “moi” when preceded by one or more names.)

In my lifetime, the linguistic changes I’ve noticed are mostly in vocabulary and expressions – from “groovy” to “in your face” to the “ough” being taken out of our “donuts.” But the seemingly imminent change of status with “with he and I” will be a first for pure grammatical change. So why do I compare this change to the melting of the polar ice cap? As if there’s something WRONG with this verbal change? Other readers may be cheering, or wondering what all the fuss is about.

Well, to be honest, I’m traditional and sentimental. After all, I am the daughter of a man who once called up my high school principal on reading in the school newspaper that “An Evening With Burt and I” would soon be coming to our stage. “You must be joking!” Dad said to the principal, who replied that the comic duo’s name was “Burt and I.” But it was nearly a heart-stopping moment for my father.

Language Lady reader Daniel White recently wrote (concerning the “if I was/If I were” rule), and commented that language people tended to be averse to change, because we like order and tidiness (well, not if you saw my desk). Yet there is something to that, grammar-wise: Grammar gives us a starting point, a guideline, and provides speakers and writers with a sense of linguistic security. Total grammatical liberation would not bring freedom, but chaos – imagine a highway with no traffic lanes.

Still, both Danny and I agree with William Safire, who says, "In the long run, usage calls the shots." So between you and I, Grammatical Polar Bears: start swimming.

Yes We Can… Split Auxiliaries

2009-02-16T23:40:00.001-05:00

As the sun rose on a new presidential administration a few weeks ago, two small grammar terms -- ones rarely talked about, thought about, or even understood – briefly shared the limelight with President Barack Obama. These terms were “split infinitive” and the more obscure, “split auxiliary.”

The two terms’ 15 minutes of fame came on Inauguration Day, January 20, at the swearing-in ceremony; there, before two million people in Washington, D.C. and millions more watching on TV around the world, Supreme Court Justice John Roberts spoke aloud, and in segments, the Constitution’s 35-word oath of office, which the incoming chief executive, who stood facing him with his hand on the Bible, was to repeat as directed. The problem? His Honor changed the wording.

Instead of having Obama “solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States,” Chief Justice Roberts led the new president to “solemnly swear that I will execute the office of President of the United States faithfully.” That is, Roberts took the word “faithfully” (an adverb) out from between “will execute.” (Here, “will” is the auxiliary, or “helping” verb and “execute” is the main verb.) Roberts then placed “faithfully” at the end of the oath, where it sounded distinctly … odd.

After a brief pause of confusion, Obama repeated Justice Roberts’s words in the order they were delivered – but Roberts’s seemingly simple flub was so big, the two were obliged – to be on the safe side – to re-do the oath the next day.

This supreme snafu was written and talked about for at least a week afterward. Part of what emerged was that Roberts, in uniting a split auxiliary, had polarized writers, commentators, and the grammatically concerned. Also emerging from the debate was a discernible confusion between “split auxiliary” and “split infinitive.” Let me now explain the difference:
“Will faithfully execute” is an example of a split auxiliary: the auxiliary verb (“will”) is separated from the main verb (“execute”) by an adverb (“faithfully”). Infinitives, meanwhile, are verbs with the word, “to,” in front of them – like “to execute.” A “split infinitive” is when the “to” is separated from its main verb, such as: “to faithfully execute.” (More on split infinitives later.)

Few grammar books currently even address split auxiliaries (though early English usage expert H.W. Fowler discusses them in his book, “The King’s English,” 1930). One reason may be that standard English syntax, or word order, has us almost always placing adverbs before the verb they modify. For example, in “She usually walks to work,” the adverb “usually” modifies “walks.” There’s no problem there, because “walks” is a single verb, standing on its own.

Verbs with auxiliaries have two-parts: has/have + verb; will + verb; did + verb. For example: “She has seen that movie” and “She will see that movie.” In those sentences, “has seen” and “will see” are together. A “split auxiliary” occurs when an adverb is placed in between the two words: “She has already seen that movie;” and “She will never see that movie.” The adverb placement of “already” and “never” seems to “split” the verb – and some grammarians feel this is wrong.

However, most current grammar books – if they even address the question – support splitting auxiliaries, since it creates the least disruption in the flow of the sentence and is the way most people speak and write.

This view is backed by Patricia T. O’Connor, author of “Woe Is I” (2003), who clearly and wittily explains grammar to native English speakers; the view is also supported by the English-as-a-second-language authors, Raymond Murphy (British) and Kenneth Folse (American), who pointedly instruct non-native speakers to place the adverb after the helping verb. Holy split auxiliary!

Of course, native English speakers know when and how to vary the rules. In her blog “Pheta Beta Cons,” conservative writer and literary critic Carol Iannone says, “It has always been possible to say in English, I will gladly come, I will come gladly, I gladly will come, and even gladly will I come and gladly I will come. The difference lies in what emphasis the speaker wishes to give and what rhetorical effect one wishes to have” and the Language Lady quite strongly agrees. But for everyday purposes, it’s hard to improve on the original.

In that way, James Madison’s “will faithfully execute” seems indisputably correct – both for standard syntax, and even as a way that gives the all-important “faithfully” its due.

The split infinitive, meanwhile, is well known in grammar circles -- and its supporters and detractors are as fervent as devoted members of a political party. The reason has something to do with the linguistic divide between those who feel grammar should represent a kind of spoken and written ideal, and those who feel it should simply reflect the way most people speak.

Most people learn about the “infinitive” (“to” + main verb) through studying a foreign language, when verbs are presented in their infinitive form – as in, “venir” (Spanish) or “kommen” (German), both of which mean “to come.” An infinitive does not show a tense or agree with a singular or plural person. Infinitives in most languages are one word, but English has a two-part infinitive -- and somewhere in the 19th century some grammarian deemed it wrong to split the two parts up. (That is, “I want to quickly finish this blog,” should instead keep the infinitive together and say, “I want to finish this blog quickly.” To Language Lady, both are fine.)

In her book, “Painless Grammar,” (Barron’s 2006) Rebecca Elliot, Ph.D., gives examples of how writing is better served by NOT splitting infinitives:

WEAK: It is usually better to not split infinitives.
BETTER: It is usually better not to split infinitives.

Elliot cautions that if you do split an infinitive, you should be sure not to put too many words between “to” and the main verb, as in:

WEAK: “My mother told me to every day and without fail come right home after school.”
BETTER: My mother told me to come home right after school every day, without fail.

In the above sentence, keeping the infinitive together improved the whole structure and order of the sentence.

Still, when separated by just one or maybe two words, a split infinitive works just fine:
FINE: In winter, I like to sometimes walk through the snowy woods by myself.
EQUALLY FINE: In winter, I sometimes like to walk through the snowy woods …

The irony in Elliot’s advice regarding too many words in a split infinitive is that Roberts made a parallel faux pas in “correcting” the oath’s split auxiliary. When he says “…solemnly swear that I will execute the office of the President of the United States faithfully,” there are no fewer than NINE words between “execute” and “faithfully;” and in that location, “faithfully” almost seems like an afterthought -- instead of what should be a central idea.

And yet there are quite strong feelings in favor of Roberts’s changes out there:

A loyal Language Lady reader, a lawyer, wrote in an email regarding the Roberts mess that he had tweaked a colleague’s memos over the years to “fix” the split infinitives. The unappreciative colleague considered this tweaking obsessive, hyper-correct, and unnecessary. These two represent the two conflicting sides of the to split-or-not–to-split debate.

The Pro-splitters – those who feel that splitting infinitives is fine – are supported by most current grammar books and sites. But the Anti-splitters’ views are upheld by the modern bible of grammar usage, “Elements of Style” (1959 – revised in 2000). Authors William Strunk and E.B. White say that splitting infinitives "should be avoided unless the writer wishes to put unusual stress on the adverb.”

The most famous split infinitive and one referred to in almost every article on the subject is found in the opening to the 60’s TV show, “Star Trek”: there, narrator Captain Kirk explains that the starship’s goal is “to boldly go where no man has gone before.” Even the anti-splitter lawyer above, a Strunk & White adherent, felt “boldy” usage was justified – but that “faithfully” was not. He wrote:

Most split infinitives do not call for that sort of adverbial stress, so the rule should be to avoid it in most cases. Thus, I'd say that Captain Kirk was right in saying "to boldly go"; James Madison (or whoever) was wrong in writing "to faithfully execute".

My questions to the anti-splitter lawyer are, Why doesn’t “faithfully” deserve emphasis? And where else would you put it?

After the Inauguration Day debacle, The New York Times tried to get to the bottom of Roberts’s mistake. The editors called in Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, who wrote a strongly opinionated op-ed piece on January 22 called, “Oaf of Office.” You can guess what Pinker thought of Chief Justice Roberts’s presumed Constitutional tweaking: Pinker claimed that Roberts was one of those weird grammar people who are insecure about their writing, so meekly obey some ancient, illogical, and ridiculous rule to never split two-part verbs.

Pinker’s opinion infuriated right-wing commentator Laurence Auster. In his blog, “View from the Right,” Auster said:

“Thus Pinker, the supposed rational man of science, reveals himself as a pseudo-intellectual twit operating under the sway of the stupidest and meanest liberal prejudices about conservatives, to the point where he makes up a grammatical rule (about split auxiliaries, which Auster wrote that he had never heard of) and a conservative belief about that rule that don't exist. And The New York Times published this worthless drivel.”

Auster said that not splitting infinitives was a rule “that good writers generally follow even today,” and added parenthetically: “(I myself follow it unswervingly, but don't require others to be that strict).”

Again, none of these anti-splitters has shown or even remotely suggested where “faithfully” could go that would improve upon the natural order, the one that Madison used. Saying, “I faithfully will execute” is understandable but not normal English syntax, and the same goes for, “I will execute faithfully.” And what Roberts said sounded even worse.

In fact, grammar aside, “What WAS Roberts thinking?” As a lifetime lawyer, did Roberts really think that he could change the words on a 220-year-old contract (as the oath technically is) without it mattering?

Most newspaper columnists called what Roberts did “a flub,” or an “accident,” but those would be more like mispronouncing a word, or tripping over his tongue. What Roberts actually did was tamper with the wording – which seems like sheer delusional chutzpah (akin to presidential cabinet members and nominees not paying their taxes). The question remains, was it premeditated or not:

If Roberts had rehearsed the oath– and with an estimated crowd of two million, and a televised and online audience of many more millions --- you’d think he might have gone over the oath once or twice beforehand. And say that in rehearsing, Roberts found the placement of “faithfully” to be personally annoying or, in his mind, “wrong,” you’d think he would have practiced saying it otherwise – if only for the private satisfaction of besting a founding father. And let’s say that in doing that, the grammarian side of Roberts decided that, awkward or not, and legal or not, split auxiliaries should be united, and that maybe no one would notice. This would explain why, during the inauguration, Roberts did not try to correct himself – and why Obama repeated Roberts’s words as the chief justice spoke them. We may never know for sure what ran through Roberts’s head.

As for President Obama, generally acknowledged to be an eloquent speaker, the “Yes We Can” man is firmly in favor of split auxiliaries: on the night he won the Iowa primary, he said, “You know, they said this day would never come (as opposed to “never would come”);” he later said that he would win by building a coalition for change; that that would be “how we’ll finally meet the challenges that we face as a nation (as opposed to “how we finally will meet).”

But whatever your political or split-or-not-to-split persuasion, the point is this:
Grammar was invented to enhance clarity first, eloquence second. If adhering to a rule for tradition’s sake actually takes away from the meaning, then it is
self-defeating.

However, if you feel the desire to strongly, insightfully, thoroughly, and with ample precision, respectfully disagree – then go right ahead. Except … just not with the Presidential Oath.

I’m Good, Thanks

2008-12-07T22:48:00.001-05:00

Language Lady enjoys hearing from readers, and this topic came from one of them.

Dear Language Lady,
Help! Lately, when I bump into friends and ask how they’re doing, they tend to reply, “I’m well, thanks!” Well? Doesn’t “well” mean how they’re feeling after being sick? (And that is not what they mean.) Or is saying, “I’m good, thanks” – meaning things are going okay, I’m basically happy, etc.” ungrammatical? And if so, should I feel “bad” or “badly” about this faux pas?!
-- Desperately Seeking Clarification, Leyden, MA

Dear Clarification,

With 2009 now so close, it would not be good to start another year with continued confusion – and widespread confusion too – over “well” and “good.” The correct reply is, “I’m good, thanks” – and in saying that, I am sure to have readers who are already foaming at the mouth, pointer finger raised, grammatical explanation at the ready. And Language Lady welcomes all challenges!

It seems that people who say, “I’m good,” say it because that’s what is most common, and they either think it’s grammatically correct, or don’t care either way. But people who say, “I’m well, thanks” are being what is known in linguistic circles as “hyper-correct,” thinking that “good” is ungrammatical. (Of course, you can always say, “I’m FINE, thanks” and avoid the controversy all together.)

One staunchly pro-“I’m well, thanks” blogger, is a New Zealand preacher and Toastmaster writing as The District Grammarian; there he is, down at the opposite end of the world, bemoaning what he feels is the wretched growth in popularity of “I’m good, thanks” – and blaming it all on – of all people – Elvis Presley, whose 1956 song, “Love Me Tender,” (and not, alas, “Love Me Tenderly) is, according to him, the starting point of the whole improper use of the English adverb. Here’s a snippet from his column (http://baptism.co.nz/gram09.html):

To the question “How are you”? I am sorry that the answer is increasingly “I'm good” even though no question has been made of your moral or ethical standards. The response you should be giving is “I'm well” (assuming you are). I'm just walking quick. Perhaps you mean quickly?

The well-intentioned grammarian is mixing apples with oranges here, and the difference is in the verbs. There are two types of verbs – action verbs, and non-action verbs – and each type comes with separate rules:

Let’s look at the District Grammarian’s sentence, “I’m just walking quick. Perhaps you mean quickly?” DG is right – the sentence should be, “I’m just walking quickly.” “Quickly” describes the verb, “walking;” any word that describes a verb is an adverb, and the adverb form of the adjective, “quick,” is “quickly.”

But the verb in “How are you?” is not an action verb; technically speaking, the verb “to be” (and forms, am/are/is/were etc.) is a “copulative” verb, meaning that it joins or links the subject with its “complement,” which is the word that comes after the verb that refers to the subject. For example: “She is my mother.” In that sentence, “She” and “mother” are the same thing; “she” is the subject, and “mother” is the noun complement. Now let’s take, “She is smart”; in that one, “she” and “smart” refer to the same person, so “smart” is the adjective complement.

Other copulative verbs are: act, appear, seem, become, remain, look, sound, feel, smell, taste, and grow. That is why we say, “Mmmm – that smells (or tastes) good!” or “He remained calm;” or “Your idea sounds good;” or “They seem angry.” All of those sentences are copulative (as funny as that may sound). Thus, the reply, “I’m good,” with the definition of “good” being, say, “cheerful; optimistic; amiable”, or even “free of distress or pain,” is that of the complementary adjective. (BTW, the definition that DG gives as being morally or ethically good is only one of the 41 uses of “good” listed in Dictionary.com.)
This same question, from a blogger named Lisa, in Boston, who generally writes about everyday sorts of thing and not grammar, prompted a long thread of responses. She writes (http://lisahadley.blogspot.com/2008/01/im-well-thank-you.html):

Oh grammar.
Yesterday a girl I work with tried to tell me that it's proper grammar to say "I'm good" when someone asks how I'm doing and that I'm wrong when I say "I'm well" because "well" is an adverb and "good" is an adjective. It seems that "well" functions as an adjective here, describing a state of well-being. Am I right? Spencer? Jenny? Somebody? I feel like my grammar is under attack.

Now, Language Lady readers, knowing what you have just read, what do you think? How would you reply? Here are some of the responses:

Maggie said...
ok, as an english major, and especially after being lectured on this numerous times by my department chair my entire 4 years of college, it's never ok to say "i'm good" when asked how you are. in fact, when i'm lax and it slips out in rare instances, I still look around, waiting for my dept chair to come beat me over the head with a copy of her little brown handbook (grammar) or strunk and white. don't ask.

Maggie said...
and by the way, it works the same in portuguese, you might point out. bad grammar to say "to boa" (i'm good) when someone asks you "como esta?" (how are you). you have to say "estou bem" (i'm well). so she loses in two languages, not just one.
Lisa said...
I actually pointed that out to her (she speaks Spanish). You would not say "Estoy bueno."

Anonymous said...
I hate to say it, but you were wrong. It's ok to say "I'm good." Good in this case functions as a predicate adjective. Furthermore - this is important - the "am" works as a linking verb, not an action verb as people often assume. "Grammar snobs are great big meanies"

Serge Levykin said...
The question "How?" should be answered with an adverb because it relates to a verb. "How does he swim?" - "He swims perfectly." "How do they talk?" - "They talk slowly." "How ARE you?" - "I AM well." The question refers to a manner of doing something. Questions relating to a quality pertaining to a noun should be answered with an adjective. "What colour is the sky?" - "The sky is blue." "What kind of a father is he?" - "He is good".

For a moment, Serge’s comment (and Serge is from Australia) came dangerously close to ruining my argument, and yet it goes back to the old copulative/action verb distinction: If you ask, “How does he swim?” Then “perfectly” or some other adverb – well, terribly, slowly – would be a correct reply.
But if you ask, “How does this taste?” you don’t say, “It tastes terribly,” but rather, “It tastes terrible (or good, bad, or awful)” because of the whole complementary adjective thing. In the question, “How are you?” the word “how” (technically an adverb, but not in this case) refers to “you” (a pronoun) and NOT to the verb “are,” which is merely there to link the “how” to “you.” Serge’s point about “how” being the manner of doing something applies well to swimming but not to a non-active state of being.

As for other languages, it’s like explaining to your kids why they can’t do something that their friend can: Other families--other rules. In Spanish, it’s true that the standard reply to “Como estas?” (How are you?”) is, “Estoy bien” (I’m well); in Portuguese, the question is usually phrased, “Como vai?” (How are you going?) and the response is “bem” (well) – but also, typically – “tudo bom,” i.e. “Everything’s good.” And since English is a West Germanic dialect, let’s look at German: “Wie geht es Ihnen?” means literally, “How goes it to you?” to which the standard positive response is, “Es geht mir gut,” or, “It goes to me good.”
So using other languages to justify English usage is no good (“good” as a noun).

Finally, then, which is correct: “I feel bad” or “I feel badly”? If Language Lady has made herself at all clear on this point, then you should be able to know. (Pause here to think, or hum “Jeopardy” tune.) Okay, time’s up:

If you chose “badly,” I’m sorry – you’re wrong. The “feel” in that kind of sentence is not an action verb, not the same as in, “He quickly felt the old dog’s matted fur.” In the “I feel (something emotional)” case, the subject, “I,” is followed by the linking-verb sense of “feel,” so a complement should follow that describes the subject; and since subjects are nouns or pronouns, the complement must be an adjective. So …

If you chose, “I feel bad,” you’re right! And I hope you feel good about that.

Humpty Dumpty and Wall Street: Nursery Rhymes and the News

2008-10-28T00:30:00.001-04:00

The Wall Street Journal recently ran an article with the headline, “London’s Best is Falling Down” about the decline in sales of homes in fancy London neighborhoods; a full-page ad in the New York Times featured a clay piggy bank stuffed with dollar bills, with the catchy line, “Guess Where This Little Piggy Went …” – an Ameritel ad for wireless phone bill savings. And a New Yorker cartoon last month had two lambs talking in a field, with one saying, “My self-esteem was so low I just followed her around everywhere she would go.”

Most adults, and even most children, in the English-speaking world would recognize in the headline, ad, and cartoon that each was based on a simple nursery rhyme, respectively: London Bridge is Falling Down; This Little Piggy Went to Market; and Mary Had a Little Lamb.

But those single references are nothing compared to the year Humpty Dumpty has been having: the famously clumsy egg has not only become the poster boy for the economic crisis, he has become an adjective as well, as in “Humpty Dumpty Economics,” a reference that pulls up 62,000 sites on Google and which refers to the policies that have brought the world to its current financial crisis.

But aren’t nursery rhymes for babies? Just what are Humpty Dumpty and company doing in our newspapers and magazines, anyway?

On close inspection, it can be safely said that Americans and the English like their cultural references. These include puns, parodies, and other clever takes on famous lines from classic books (Aesop’s fables, the Bible and Shakespeare, on up to more modern classic novels); movies (from cult to current favorites); and sayings from famous people, contemporary or historical -- all of which run rampant in the headlines of the New York Times, the Economist, and other prominent publications in the United States and England.

The Economist used Aesop’s fable, Tortoise and the Hare, to draw readers to an article about Argentina and Brazil; the New Yorker last month used the same pair on the cover as a metaphor for the continued presidential race.

This past spring, when now ex-New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was caught cheating on his wife with a call girl from an agency called The Emperor’s Club, the reference to Hans Christian Anderson’s tale of the Emperor’s New Clothes inspired headlines for the New York Observer and Institutional Investor, as well as another New Yorker cover.

A recent full-page ad in Newsweek and elsewhere,from the company iShares, featured a simple acorn, with the tag line: “Maybe the Sky Isn’t Falling,” with the added message, “Don’t let all the hype and uncertainty distract you from your long-term investment goals.” The ad assumes readers remember the alarmist Chicken Little, who, when an acorn falls on his head in a forest one day, runs off to tell the king that the sky is falling.

Editors, headline writers, advertisers, and cartoonists of the English-speaking world use these references as a way of luring readers to their articles and illustrations. Americans like these cultural references (I’m generalizing broadly here) because they’re catchy, direct, and make a potentially complex subject seem easy; the English, meanwhile (and more generalizing), like cultural references because they appeal to their more literary, verbally playful side.

So, for example, an article about Australian river management in the Economist is titled, “Not so gently down the stream,” a reference to the preschool favorite, “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” Such a title might actually get a reader to peruse at least the first paragraph, whereas something like “Climate change and drought change boating habits in Australia” would ring up a “Next!” and a quick flick to the next page.

Nursery rhymes are an interesting pick for cultural references, though, because they go back to poems and ditties we learn as preverbal, or barely verbal, babies. The rhymes and characters found in these verses, most of which are between 150 and 400 years old, are silly and old fashioned at best, and then sometimes downright strange and bizarre choices for soothing or entertaining children: (see “Rockabye Baby”). Some rhymes were made up for children, while others are disguised as darker political statements whose meaning has been long forgotten. (Why else would parents continue to sing about a baby falling out of a tree, cradle and all?!) Even so, somehow these early poems stay with us – and explain in shorthand, and with simple humor, what is going on in our world.

But say you are a foreigner – even one quite fluent in English – but nonetheless unfamiliar with Mother Goose (the mythical figure who made up these rhymes). And say you see a New Yorker cover, such as the one from this past February:
There before you is a giant, vaguely grotesque egg dressed in bow tie and suit, a skinny arm raised in despair, while sitting on a wall marked “Stock Exchange.” You get that it is financially related, but why … an egg?

Meanwhile, the English-speaking audience knows the meaning at a glance from four simple lines learned long, long ago:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall;
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

Humpty Dumpty is an instant, visual metaphor for the recent failure of banks, government lending institutions, and private Wall Street companies -- and the inability of economists and policy-makers to put him back together again.

These days, financial crisis headlines using Humpty Dumpty shorthand range from established business publications to personal blog sites. There is Forbes magazine’s “The Humpty Dumpty Economy” and the Financial Times’ “Humpty-Dumpty legal interpretation by the UK government” (re frozen British assets in Icelandic banks); then there’s “The Coyote’s Byte: A Place for Me to Howl at the Moon” (from Phoenix, AZ): “Humpty Dumpty and Republicans That Make You Go Hmm…”

In any case, by the time we start kindergarten we have already started to forget them; by the time we’re teens and young adults, Humpty Dumpty, Little Bo Peep and the rest of the gang are faded, distant, barely memorable memories. But then – boom: once we become a newspaper-reading adult, the headlines and references to those lost rhymes and characters rise, somewhat hazily, to the surface; and once we become parents ourselves, and crack open the Mother Goose book received as a baby present, the verses are more fully revived, ready to be passed on from one generation to the next.

Just how much longer such rhymes remain a source of cultural and generational unity is something the British currently worry about: “Humpty Dumpty Falls From Favour” (The Times, July 2007), as new parents find these rhymes “irrelevant” and perhaps not as catchy as newer tunes. My own son -- now 17 years old but at one time a big Humpty Dumpty fan – sees little use in repeating these seemingly strange verses. But time has yet to tell if the sky is falling on nursery rhymes as cultural references, or not.

Part and Participled

2008-09-07T13:46:00.001-04:00

“Parts of the city might be under-retailed, though I don’t think any part of the city is under-Dunkin’ Donuted.”
--Jonanthan Bowles, Center for an Urban Future,

“Under-Dunkin’ Donuted”?

The quote came from the free daily newspaper, Metro, in a recent article about the number of chain restaurants in New York City. I don’t think that the speaker, Jonathan Bowles, intended to coin any particularly new usage with his unique “under-Dunkin’ Donuted” – it was probably just the most efficient way for him to say that although some areas of the city might not have enough stores in general, nowhere is there a lack of Dunkin’ Donuts.

Now I know we American English speakers have taken certain brand names and turned them in nouns – like Kleenex , Band-aid, Post-it. And some of those brand names nouns are also verbs (scotch tape, Xerox, Wite-Out). Other languages have turned brand names into general nouns: Spanish, with Bic (for “pen”); French with Gillette (as “razors.”)

But I don’t know another language where you can take the name of a store, restaurant, or in this case, an international chain retailer that sells 35 varieties of donuts and other calorie-laden goodies, and turn it into a participle.

A participle is that verb form that ends in either “ing” (informing) or “ed” (informed) or some irregular ending (written, sold, brought, etc); it can act as a verb (I am informing; I have informed) or an adjective (I am informed). Participles are amazingly useful in everyday speech.

Participles that end in “ing” are present participles; they’re present because they show some action in progress (either now or in the past): I am working; I was working; I have been working, etc. Past participles are ones that go with helping verbs like “have” and “had”: I have written; you had worked. And it is this past participle form that is also used as an adjective – and the one that has become the most flexible:

When I moved to New York in the 1980’s a friend commented that people in Manhattan were totally “yupped” out, meaning that everyone looked very yuppy (do you remember the word created from “young urban professionals”?) in their work clothes – especially women in their shoulder-padded blazers and floppy ties.

Did you catch the word “shoulder-padded” just now? That is a participle, which, like under-Dunkin’ Donuted, you will not find in the dictionary, but which requires no explanation to understand that it means, blazers with shoulder pads. If I had said “… women in their blazers with shoulder pads and floppy ties” it would have sounded like the blazers had floppy ties. And if I had written “women in their floppy ties and blazers with shoulder pads,” it would have been clearer, but clumsy. Shoulder-padded is the way to go – and unofficial though the word may be, English does not need any grammatical permission to make those kinds of switcheroos. The structure of our language is set up to handle that kind of thing.

In German, there is a fanciful term for “jack of all trades” that translates as “the egg-laying, wool-and-milk pig” or eierlegende wollmilchsau (Iyer-LAY-guehn-duh-vole-milsh-zow). In a Latin language such a concept would have to be written out as “a pig that lays eggs and produces wool and milk” – which loses much in the translation. English can clearly handle the idea; we just happen not to have that particular expression in our book. But the fact that we can stack our participles-as-adjectives and turn nouns (wool, milk) into adjectives to describe a type of versatile pig shows the essence of our language’s West Germanic foundation—and the basis for its flexibility.

Such verbal elasticity shows up with Google, a trademark term (noun, and one derived from “googol,” a mathematical term) that is scarcely as old as a fifth grader, but which is now noted in the dictionary in lower case as a verb: I google, I googled, I have googled. And though it is not yet listed as an adjective, it certainly is used that way -- as in, “a much-googled site.” (I just googled “googled site” and there were over 2 million usages, though some of them were the past tense of google, and not the participle.)

Starbucks, that popular purveyor of caffeinated beverages, is not in the dictionary yet, nor has it even become an unofficial common noun or verb, despite its ubiquity. Still, as a participle, it clearly works: if you said that your neighborhood was totally over-Starbucked (or in lower case, starbucked), you would know just how easy it is to get a double soy latte where you live. In fact, there are over 30,000 Google usages listed for “Starbucked.”

But so far, "under-Dunkin' Donuted" has only a single reference on Google – the one in the August 1, 2008 New York Metro. It’s such a specific adjective that I can’t imagine much room for its growth, except maybe as another part of speech. As a noun, it might be used like, “The under-Dunkin’ Donutedness of the neighborhood ...” As a verb, it could go: “Homeowners have intentionally under-Dunkin’ Donuted the neighborhood.” Have fun with it!

However, perhaps we’ll start to see more chain retailers turn into participial adjectives – like, over-jamba juiced or thoroughly chipotleed (2 “e’s” for the final “e” sound). But “under-Dunkin’ Donuted” has a certain special sound: maybe it’s the recurring, alliterative “d” in its four out of seven syllables, and the way you have to say each syllable clearly — there’s no way you can rush that phrase, yet. Plus it’s a lot funnier-sounding than say, “Mac Attack” (a noun meaning a sudden craving for a MacDonald’s Big Mac hamburger).

It’s simply hard not to appreciate “under-Dunkin’ Donuted” as a prime example of everyday English adaptability, and a sort of delicious one at that.

Howya Doin? Contracted Speech

2008-08-25T08:10:00.004-04:00

The Language Lady’s “No-Business-Like-Shoe-Business” Award for Linguistic License goes this summer to Kenneth Cole’s flagship Rockefeller store: The backdrop for the July window display had two wall-sized panels with July written in bold across the panels. On either side of July were gray-colored words that, on close inspection, were questions that used that word “July” in an unusual way:

July about your weight? July about how much you make? July about walking the dog? July about renting a house in the Hamptons? July about your age? July about what you did last night? July about the report? Why July to me?

Whoever dreamed that up deserves some major props (Didn’t know I knew rap slang popularized in the 1990’s, did you? “Props” is short for “proper respect.”) for using linguistic contraction in such a timely and seasonal manner. English is full of such contraction, or reduction, in our everyday speech: Whadja do daday? Didja hafta say that? I’m gonna letcha have it. Wanna go? Even the most articulate speakers, if they want to sound natural, use this type of reduction in their speech – or risk sounding too formal and stilted. But until the Kenneth Cole window display, I had never seen “did you lie” rendered as “July.” And in July! Nice.

Of course, we have Woody Allen to thank for this: his “Annie Hall” (1977) brought this type of speech into mass awareness. In the movie, Woody, playing the insecure, neurotic character Alvy Singer, who feels painfully aware of his “outsider” status because he is Jewish, complains to his friend about what he perceives as an anti-Semitic remark. Alvy says:
“You know, I was having lunch with some guys from NBC, so I said, 'Did you eat yet or what?' And Tom Christie said, 'No, JEW?' Not 'Did you?'...JEW eat? JEW? You get it? JEW eat?”
(www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaPBhxXhprg&feature=related)

It just so happens that in English, it’s easier to say words or syllables with “d” followed by “u” as a “j” sound. Try saying these out loud: graduation; “how bad you are;” “could you/would you …”

(Likewise, “t” + “u” creates a “tcha” sound, as in “nature,” or “congratulations,” when we say, “get you” and it sounds like “getchu.” That’s why when some people pronounce “mature” as “ma-toor” instead of “ma-tchoor” it sounds pretentious. But Dictionary.com says both pronunciations are correct.)

This kind of informal speech no doubt exists in other languages but, not being at native level in any, I can only give a few examples. Languages like Spanish and Japanese pronounce every syllable with more or less equal stress, making reduction less likely. However, in some Spanish-speaking countries, the “s” in words gets dropped before a “p” or “t” : i.e., “espantoso” will sound like “eh-pantoso” and “estado” will sound like “eh-tado;” for example, I believe Puerto Ricans do this all the time, whereas such pronunciation in Argentina will have people laughing at your baby-talk. In French, the “ne” often gets dropped in a spoken negative sentence: “Je ne sais pas” is typically heard as “je sais pas;” “je n’ai pas d’argent” is said, “J’ai pas d’argent” -- though never in writing.

The other day I overheard a very proper-French receptionist speaking on the phone, and she was apologizing to the person on the other end; but instead of saying, “Je suis desolee,” (zhe swee desolay) or “I’m sorry,” she was saying (repeatedly, with some insistence) what sounded like, “Shwee desolee.” That sound is just the sort of speech captured in a linguistically groundbreaking French book called "Zazie dans le metro" (1959) by Raymond Queneau:

“Doukipudonktan” is the first word of this antic novel (Louis Malle directed the 1960 movie), which is peppered throughout with many such strange-looking phonetic renderings of colloquial speech. Even French readers do not immediately recognize all these renderings. “Doukipudonktan” is actually “D'où qu'ils puent donc tant,” or “Why do they stink so much?” Other such compressions include: “Skeutadittaleur” = “Qu’est-ce qu’il t’a dit, alors?” or, “So what did he tell you?”; “Izont des bloudjinnzes”= “Ils sont des bluejeans,” or “They’re bluejeans;” “Kouavouar” = “Quoi a voir?” or “What’s there to see?” “Lagosamiebou” or “La gosse a mis la boue” or “The girl has flown the coop.” All this is meant to convey the very working class-ordinary joe sort of people these characters are. Same as when we write that way in English. The difference is, we do it in English all the time – in novels, ads, comic books, and in our own shorthand-style of writing (I’m gonna, do you wanna, see ya,” etc.) In French and Spanish (and no doubt other languages) this type of speech is spoken, but rarely conveyed in writing – even in comics like Asterix or Tin Tin.

So, we’re lucky: instead of my having to write, “I’ve got to go,” all I hafta write is, “Gotta go!” or, text message-style, “G2G.”

Flip Flops

2008-08-02T23:45:00.000-04:00

It’s almost too hot to write, much less read, a blog; but if you’ve got time and air conditioning, maybe a short one, sort of seasonal, would be okay. It’s now midsummer – and it’s midsummer in an election year, so have you noticed how “flip flops” are working overtime as both noun (sandal) and verb (to reverse one’s position on an issue)?

Once upon a time -- back when McDonald’s had just one franchise, when Bill Haley and the Comets were singing “Rock Around the Clock” on the radio -- there was no word for a cheap, thin-soled rubber sandal with a sort of curved, upside down Y separating the big toe from the rest of the toes. There wasn’t a word for it, because the “flip flop” had not yet been invented. Until then, people wore thin, canvas sneakers to the beach; and the words “flip” and “flop” were like two siblings – alike in many ways, but intrinsically totally opposite.

“Flip” is generally positive: A guy flips for a girl (and vice-versa); we flip coins and pancakes; and mastering flips from a diving board or trampoline is considered a praiseworthy talent – while belly flopping (ouch!) is not. “Flop” is generally bad: a comedian gets flop sweat when the audience doesn’t laugh; when a movie flops, heads roll in Hollywood. You don’t want hair flopping in your face, nor do you want to sleep in a flophouse. Flopping onto a couch is good but often associated with sheer fatigue, boredom, or depression.

Cut to 1957, when the “flip-flop” summer sandal was invented: The name was probably derived from the sound the backless shoe makes as you walk -- fffflp-flllllop, fffflip-fffflop. (These are also called thongs and beach shoes). Flip-flops have morphed over the years from the still available cheap and plain to the more popular snazzy, sporty, patterned – even diamond-studded. Flip flops have become such a fashion statement that in 2005 the Northwestern champion women’s lacrosse team wore flip-flops to meet President Bush at the White House, apparently not perceiving what a fashion faux pas this was – some dubbed it “The Flip-Flop Flap “ -- until they ended up in the national news. (As I had to explain to my own teenagers – their toes should have been covered; yes, even for George Bush).

But flip-flop, the verb, only recently came into everyday use: in the 2004 presidential election, presidential nominee John Kerry was seen as switching his stance on the war in Iraq, and that became known as “flip-flopping.” According to salon.com, the Republicans used Kerry’s changing positions to make him look weak and waffling, compared to what Republicans called Bush’s “firm” (as opposed to “stubborn” or “intransigent”) stance. Kerry’s flip-flopping was used against him with deadly precision -- we know who was elected.

Flip-flopping, the verb, then lay fairly dormant for the next three years until the 2008 presidential contenders hit the campaign trail last year. Early on in their runs for the nomination, Democratic contender John Edwards flip-flopped on issues, as did Republican contender Mitt Romney – as reported in multiple news articles. And not long after their flip-flops both of those “coulda-been-a-contender” contenders were has-been contenders. Flip-flopping is not good if you want to run for president. That was presumably why Hillary Clinton never voiced the slightest remorse for having voted for invading Iraq – despite the war’s unpopularity with her voter base, she did not want to be brought down by the flip-flop curse. (It was other things that brought her down instead).

These days, as both presumptive presidential nominees Barak Obama and John McCain modify, hone, or outright reverse their positions, the “flip-flop” verb has appeared attached to their names in news articles everywhere. To the press, no matter how slight or subtle a politician’s change of position may be (granted, with politicians, it’s rarely either) when a politician changes his mind for what seems to be political expedience, it’s all flip-flopping.

However, since both Obama and McCain have flip-flopped on certain issues, the curse of the flip-flop curse has been canceled out – one of the flip-floppers has to win. So you could say that whoever wins will have flipped (reversed) the flip-flop flop this time.

Being and Not Being a Gerund

2008-05-11T23:37:00.001-04:00

A cartoon in a recent New Yorker magazine shows a Buddhist monk leading a yoga class with several middle-aged men and women. One woman has her hand raised and is asking the instructor, “You say that life is suffering, but isn’t it also complaining?”

Agreeing or disagreeing with the question is not the point here; rather, today’s subject is our friend, “the gerund,” which is a type of noun formed from a verb and which ends in “ing.” Suffering and complaining, in the sentence above, are gerunds, each one serving as a complement to “life.”

The inspiration for this topic is a letter from Language Lady reader Danny White, whose enquiring mind had him recently pondering gerunds and non-gerunds:

Hi Louise,

Here's one for you: What's the proper term for a non-gerund? That is, when you're trying to distinguish between a verb in the gerund form and a verb in the non-gerund form, what do you call the latter?
A person who's not a Jew is a gentile. Food that isn't kosher is traif. A verb that's not a gerund is ... what?
This comes up in the context of my discussion of "as well as." If you view "as well as" as a preposition (examples to follow), then the verb that follows should be a gerund. But if you view "as well as" as a conjunction, then the verb that follows should be a ... what? Non-gerund? "Regular" verb?
Example:
• "Upon winning office, a member of the House of Representatives will campaign for the next two years, as well as drinking like a fish and hustling underage girls." (Here, "as well as" is treated like a preposition, with the verbs that follow being put in the gerund form.)
• "Upon winning office, a member of the House of Representatives will campaign for the next two years, as well as drink like a fish and hustle underage girls." (Here, "as well as" is treated like a conjunction, with the verbs that follow being put in the ... what form?)
See the question? Nobody in the world but a nerd like me would ever care about the answer, but I thought maybe someone like you would know the answer (even if you don't care about it).

How could Language Lady NOT care about this?! It’s the air I breathe, my lifeblood, and other clichés, parts of speech, and grammar terms that get me out of bed in the morning.

Before answering however, I thought a little trip down Gerund Lane might be useful for readers whose knowledge of such forms and functions may be a little rusty.

The gerund is one of a little family of grammatical things called “verbals,” or parts of speech formed from verbs. Like verbs, these words can express action, abstract action, or a state of being: Action verbs: run, jump, fall, etc.; Abstract verbs: have, love, feel, think, suffer, complain. Being verb: (you guessed it): be.

There are three members of the Verbal family, and the other two are the “infinitive” and the “participle.” The infinitive is the base part of a verb preceded by “to,” as in, “to suffer” and “to complain,” or, as Macbeth once asked, “to be, or not to be.” The participle is an adjective formed from a verb that ends in either “ing,” as in “crying” babies, or in “ed,” as in, “I'm shocked, shocked (to find that gambling is going on in here!” -- Capt. Renault, “Casablanca”). The participle is also the “ing” or “ed” (or irregular ending) of verbs that take helping verbs, as in
“I am writing” and “I have written;” or “talking/talked,” “jumping/jumped,” “emailing/emailed,” etc.

(For further insight into Verbals, I recommend the Owl writing and grammar site from Purdue University: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/627/02/)

Now then, let’s look again Danny’s question, “..when you're trying to distinguish between a verb in the gerund form and a verb in the non-gerund form, what do you call the latter?”

I’ll pause here to let you answer.

(Pause)

Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Yes, it’s a Participle!

(Unpause) (Danny’s letter continued:)

This comes up in the context of my discussion of "as well as." If you view "as well as" as a preposition (examples to follow), then the verb that follows should be a gerund.

(Pause again.)

Danny brings up a really cool point -- one that most native speakers of English probably just take for granted: that when we have phrases like “thank you for” or “looking forward to” or “he broke his arm by,” we always follow them with a gerund when expressing some kind of action. That is, “thank you for inviting me;” “looking forward to seeing you;” and “he broke his arm by falling out of a tree.” In each case, the gerund follows a preposition (words like in, on, at, by, from, to, on, through etc.)

Danny’s confusion is thinking that “as well as” is a prepositional phrase. Prepositions are, as the term implies, little words that show a “position” of something or someone (in the dark, through the forest, etc.) “As” is an adverb; and depending on the context, “as well as” is either an adverbial phrase (“He shoots pool as well as his mother does.”) or a type of conjunction, something that joins other words or phrases (like “and,” “but,” “or,” etc. As in, “We went shopping all day as well as dancing all night.”)

(Unpause – back to Danny):

Example:
• "Upon winning office, a member of the House of Representatives will campaign for the next two years, as well as drinking like a fish and hustling underage girls." (Here, "as well as" is treated like a preposition, with the verbs that follow being put in the gerund form.)
Thinking that “as well as” was a prepositional phrase forced Danny to turn “drink” and “hustle” into “drinking” and “hustling,” resulting in a type of grammatical faux pas known as “non-parallel structure.” Let’s break the sentence down into basic parts: the subject of the sentence is “member;” and what does that House member do? He “will campaign.” And what ELSE?
By treating “as well as” as a conjunction, which it is, and which Danny does in his second sentence, he arrives at the correct answer and good parallel structure: in its most basic, sentence-diagrammable form, the House member will campaign (and also) drink and hustle. Just as Danny says below:
But if you view "as well as" as a conjunction …
• "Upon winning office, a member of the House of Representatives will campaign for the next two years, as well as drink like a fish and hustle underage girls …"
•
• … then you get the perfect, parallel-structured and grammatically correct sentence.

Danny’s final question is:
• (Here – referring to the second example sentence -- "as well as" is treated like a conjunction, with the verbs that follow being put in the ... what form?)
Anyone like to try? (I mentioned this form briefly a little earlier.) When you have a helping, or auxiliary, verb – in this case, “will” (as in “will campaign”), the verb that follows is the non-conjugated base or stem form. And since “drink” and “hustle” are as much a main verb as “campaign,” they take the base form too.
Thanks for writing, Danny – and most of all, thanks for (gerund, please): caring!

Subprime Grammar

2008-04-06T20:55:00.000-04:00

Tucked into the English Reference section at Barnes & Noble, next to titles like “Painless Grammar,” “Woe is I,” and “Grammar for Dummies,” are several copies of a new little work with the crude but catchy title, “Grammar Sucks.” That a writer and editor – presumably word-and-grammar people themselves – would choose that vulgar verb, and popular attitude, to hook potential buyers into improving their shaky grasp of grammar; and that a major national bookstore chain would bet that such a title would sell, shows you how just low the subject of grammar has sunk.

Meanwhile, speaking of sinking, there’s the economy: the credit market, the housing market, the job market, and – if you’re thinking “interest rates,” that would be “cut,” or “slash,” not “sink.” Gas and airline prices are on the rise, making our spirits sink. And then there’s that clump of words that appears almost daily on the front pages: “the subprime mortgage crisis,” usually followed by “troubled investment bank,” “bailout,” and, for those of us outside the financial industry, this year’s newest vocabulary word, “writedown” (n.) meaning the amount (these days, in billions of dollars – i.e. unimaginable amounts) that at least ten major international investment banks are writing off their books (at a loss to all the shareholders) mostly through subprime mortgage deals, which seem to have triggered the whole economic mess.

The public’s taste, or really, distaste, for learning grammar has been at an ebb for decades, while the economy’s drubbing is fairly new. Still, it’s no coincidence that the two have arrived at the same lousy point – not that the government is bailing banks out due to improper use of past participles or irregular verbs. Rather, where grammar and troubled banks are linked is at the core, with structure.

On the grammar side, the whole notion that “grammar is boring” is something that came out of the 60’s, when traditional ideas were tossed in favor of snazzier, more fun ways of learning. Take “Sesame Street,” for example: learning with Muppets was fun, and by now, generations of preschoolers have learned their ABC’s by watching bouncing, talking, or morphing letters on their TV screens.

Alas, Bert and Ernie did not go into nouns, verbs, objects, comma placement, or the subjunctive case. Maybe they thought it wouldn’t be fun, or age appropriate, or that it would turn away their core audience. (Though adult caregivers might have watched.) Apparently, progressive English teachers could not come up with a fun way to impart grammar either, and the pedagogical philosophy that emerged was, “No more grammar lessons -- let students learn by DOING!” So students wrote, and teachers corrected, mostly fitfully, per essay, and not in any orderly, formal manner.

And in the beginning, that attitude seemed refreshing, and even democratic: who was to say one person’s grammar was better than another’s, as long as we could all understand each other. “Have it your way,” went the famous 1974 Burger King ad, which was revived in 2004 and still, unwittingly, stands for so much in American culture, including speaking and grammar.

True, you can learn by doing. But even young, natural athletes need a coach to help them perfect their pitching, slap shots, or swings. Similarly, we also need teachers to help us sharpen our ability to communicate clearly -- and we need an understanding of grammar to do this.

Grammar is the system of rules that guides how words are put together to make sentences; those rules, developed over centuries of speaking, provide the underlying structure to a language. A three-year-old can grasp a language’s structure and speak fluently and fairly grammatically.

But around 3rd or 4th grade, it’s a good idea to start to teach children grammar rules, because if you understand the parts of speech (nouns, verbs, etc.) then you can go on to understand the parts of a sentence (subject, object, etc.); and if you understand those two components, which include punctuation, you’ll have the necessary tools and knowledge to shape your ideas in clear, solid, dangling-modifier-free, and even eloquent English.

Remember “Mad Libs”? They’re still around. The gap-filled pages provide the story structure, while you (without looking) provide the parts of speech; the results, when read aloud, are wacky, or plain nonsense, but it is all grammatically correct. That is the beauty of grammar – its structure holds even when word choice inhibits the meaning.

I recently experimented with a 16-year-old, extremely smart, native-English speaking student of mine, who has never been taught grammar in school. I had her fill in a Mad-Lib-style sentence that used the opening line to “Pride and Prejudice” for its structure. I asked her for certain parts of speech and the results were not exactly Jane Austen: “It is a tragedy not wanted that a mournful clown in possession of a stingy cat must be in wont of a mouse.” Nonsense, yes – but grammatical, absolutely.

Not providing knowledge of grammar prevents children, and many adults, from correctly and concisely constructing more complex thoughts. For example: Last month, in his first statement to the press about his affair with a prostitute, ex-governor of New York Eliot Spitzer said, “I am disappointed and failed to live up to the standard I expected of myself.”

True, Spitzer got the reflexive pronoun (“myself”) part right; but in addition to failing his own standards, the ex-gov failed to tell us what he was disappointed with (or by, or in), as in: “I am disappointed in my behavior,” for instance, or maybe just disappointed that he got caught. But he shouldn’t have just hung his disappointment there without some specific object. It sounds weak and muddled and only compounds his current image.

Commenting on Spitzer’s departure in his foreword to the March issue, the editor of “Institutional Investor” magazine, Michael Carroll, needed a teacher to wrap his knuckles for this unwieldy sentence: “Spitzer’s apology at least puts to rest any thought that he might try to argue that he had gone undercover, as it were, to see whether the ratings assigned by the Emperors Club to its employees were accurate in much the same way that he and his minions once investigated the accuracy of reports written by Wall Street’s research analysts – and found them wanting.”

President Bush, currently the Leader of the Mangled Word, is old enough to have been taught grammar before they took it out of the curriculum. But that doesn’t mean teaching grammar is a waste of time for everyone: just because I failed to dissect my frog properly doesn’t mean other biology students shouldn’t get to try.

At least thirty years have passed since our nation’s public schools required young minds to identify subjects and predicates or an object of a preposition (“A what?!” you shriek.) So now our teachers – those born in the 60’s, 70’s or early 80’s – do not have the foundation for grammar necessary to teach their students, our children. Yet grammar-challenged parents determined to somehow teach grammar to their offspring, or even to themselves, can always head to their nearest bookstore English reference section and find books like “Grammar Sucks” to explain it all to them in dumbed-down, ironic prose.

Which brings us to the whole subprime mortgage crisis/credit market mess – or a total lack of structure. Now, I can only explain this financial stuff in Language Lady terms, so don’t go running off to the head of Goldman Sachs to check on every point. But big picture:

Pick a “structure” metaphor – would you invest in a house without beams; a book without a spine; wine without a bottle? A while ago, as a way to make more money, banks (local and big ones) invented and started selling financial products, called (ironically) “structured investment vehicles;” they sold these products to millions of investors here and around the world, with many banks keeping some of the riskier/potentially more profitable products for themselves.

Imagine a cake box as your structured product. Your financial advisor tells you it’s AAA-rated and a solid investment that will yield a delicious yellow cake with fabulous chocolate frosting; so you hand over your money and wait for the cake to rise. But the ingredients inside are not what you think – in fact, the ingredients (which include loans with enticing initial interest rates – i.e., interest rates lower than the prime interest rate, or “subprime” -- to people with less-than-stellar credit) are completely incapable of producing a cake at all, and what you get instead is a runny, gooey mess. The structure – the box – was a sham.

But who’s to blame? The whole structured product business was put together, pre-fab chip-by-pre-fab chip, by loads of investors, banks, etc. – i.e. people – who had gotten used to following their own guidelines, whether financial or grammatical.

Which is not to say that had investors and bankers, as elementary and middle school students, been forced to learn the principles of solid sentence structure, they would not have created today’s economic mess. But you never know: an unconscious, innate respect for structure might have set off some kind of inner alarm bell in at least a few people.

Sherlock Holmes, the brilliant, fictional detective whose success was grounded in the structure of reason and deduction, would certainly never have bought a structured product without knowing to the molecule what it contained. And Sherlock’s talents might have led some structure-abiding financial authority to force Sherlock’s broker to break down the contents of the, ultimately, bad product.

Say some grammar-knowledgeable investors had read the finer points on their structured vehicle contracts and noticed some dangling modifiers or strangled syntax. Further investigation on their part might have revealed a similarly weak structural product – and ended the deal before any money was traded. The failure of that deal and others like it may have prompted the corollary that bad grammar is a smoke signal for weak structural thinking and therefore, possibly, a bad investment.

The good news is that the notorious college entrance exam, the S.A.T., has recently added a grammar component to the test. This will surely prompt a revival of grammar classes in schools and language institutes across the land – for teachers (to finally learn it) and students alike.

But improvement – on the economic and grammar fronts – will take time, effort, and patience. And with all that maybe, someday, (right -- in my dreams), I’ll come across a book with the title, Grammar’s Sweet!”

Likewise,

The Language of Sound

2008-03-02T13:23:00.001-05:00

As I write, I hear the sounds of early morning: sparrows chirping in a tree, the distant and lonesome coo of a dove, a crow cawing as it flies overhead; last night’s wet snow has now melted and is trickling off the roof and down the rain pipes, and Tito, our cat, is meowing to be let in from his night’s prowl. (Just a second while I go open the door for him.) Inside is the reassuring whisper of central heating – a sound so natural that I only notice it when it clicks off – and the rapid bubbling of water boiling in the kettle on the stove for my tea. (I’ve opened the spout cap so I won’t hear the shrill whistle.) Chirp, coo, caw, meow, trickle, whisper, click, bubble, whistle: just as language is made up of different vocal sounds, the sounds we hear are made into language. Every language has these sound words, and some of these are called “onomatopoeia.”

Onomatopoeia (a great word for spelling bees), which is pronounced ahna-mahda-PIA, is the term for words that imitate the sound associated with the thing or action in question. The word, “onomatopoeia,” you’ve maybe guessed, is from Greek and it means, simply, “to make (poiein) a name (onoma).” These imitative words differ from language to language, but the idea is the same: animal sounds like moo, oink, bow-wow, quack, etc., as well as sounds found in nature like “hiss,” “buzz,” “hum,” etc. are examples of onomatopoeia.

Other words do not imitate sounds so much as suggest them; these include words like “clank,” “grunt,” “whip,” “dash,” “sleazy,” and “giggle.” Some linguists lump these “sound-suggestive” words with onomatopoeia; others distinguish them as “phonaesthetic” words. I’ll make it easy on all of us but calling both groups “sound words.”

In any case, no matter what language you speak, life is full of sounds and our respective languages reflect that:

Think how many sounds we hear in a day: the br-r-ring of the alarm clock (if you’re a masochist) or the drone of the morning’s radio alarm; the splash of water from the sink and shower; yawns, burps, the jangle of house keys, the slam of the front door; there’s the honking from cars, the whir of a train’s engine; the screech of the subway pulling into the station; there’s the clang of the school bell; the groan of students being hit with a “pop” quiz; the beep of a cell phone; the click of heels on a tiled floor; the crinkle of a wrapper being pulled off a candy bar; the murmur people talking on a bus; the crack of someone folding a newspaper; the pop of a cork; ice cubes clinking in a glass; the plop of gravy spilled on the floor; the slurp of a dog eating dinner; the hum of the dish washer; a child’s wail for water and comfort in the night; a tired sigh as you crawl into bed.

These words are old – going back hundreds or more years. Early farmers no doubt needed a word to describe the sound of milk coming from a cow or goat (squirt); or how it felt to hammer your thumb (OW!!); or to know the certain sound in the bushes (rustle) that meant either enemy or just a squirrel.

And with all those undeveloped woods back then, villagers would have had to know the sounds of the forest: the rattle of bare branches, the gurgle of a stream, the growl of a bear, the howl of a wolf. In the village would be the clip-clop of horses’ hooves on cobblestone; the clatter of constructing all those quaint half-timber houses and marketplaces, plus the hustle and bustle of everyday commerce, in addition to the steady chatter, patter and gab among the townspeople, and the peal of church bells on Sunday.

Sound words can slink, slither, slip, and slide almost unconsciously into our lives and vocabulary; or they can appear with a gush, burst, or spurt of creativity: The 60’s TV show “Batman” is known for bringing onomatopoetic words like “POW!” “BAM!” “KRRASH!” and “WHAM!” into our lives. My brother-in-law is informally called Biff, which is the sound, according to his mother, that he uttered as a little boy fighting imaginary foes -- “Bfff! Bfff!”. And in Cole Porter’s song, “Paris,” we’re told: “I love Paris in the autumn when it drizzles; I love Paris in the summer when it sizzles.” “Drizzle” so well conveys a light but steady rain; and “sizzle” suggests summer heat – the hissing sound of raw meat hitting a hot barbecue.

One interesting imitative word is, “gnaw,” as in, “to bite or chew with a scraping noise,” like a dog gnawing on a bone, or a mouse on the wood inside your kitchen wall; it’s interesting because it’s so similar in sound and spelling in such a wide variety of languages: Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian have gnave (pron: g’nah-veh), gnage, and gnaga; Latvian-grauzt and Lithuanian-grauzhti; Polish – gryzc (grooch); and Russian – grizt; Latin-based languages gave up the “g” but kept the basic idea: Portuguese - roer (a throaty ghro-ehhr); French – ronger (a nasal rohnZHAY); and Italian – rosicare (a lovely trilled rozee-KA-reh, which is similar to the others except completely loses the dog-chewing sound in favor of the language’s natural music). “Gnaw,” according to the dictionary, goes back to Anglo-Saxon times; however, in view of its use in other languages and cultures, it’s probably safe to say this verb has been around for as long as dogs and bones.

The word “cuckoo” is also a fairly universal sound, even though the cuckoo bird, native to tropical climes, is mostly known from Swiss clocks. Its meaning can vary from country-to-country too. For example, saying, “Cou-cou” is currently in vogue in France as an informal greeting among French women; said quickly as one word, “coucou” means, “peek-a-boo,” as in the baby’s game, both of which could also be seen as sound words. In the U.S., “cuckoo” means simply “crazy.”

Lewis Carroll has been wowing word-lovers for 130-plus years with his onomatopoeistic masterpiece, “The Jabberwocky,” found in his story, “Through the Looking Glass.” In that poem -- about a boy going into the woods to slay an imaginary monster -- Carroll invented words to sound like the imaginary animals or actions he wanted to convey. It begins: “T’was brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimbel in the wabe ...” Roughly translated it means, “It was evening and the slimy-lithe imaginary forest creatures turned round and round and made holes in the grass plot around a sundial.”

But the point of “The Jabberwocky” is not to translate it into ordinary language, but just to have fun saying the made-up words that rhyme with ones you know: “… the jaws that bite, the claws that catch; beware the jubjub bird and shun the frumious bandersnatch.” (The poem has even been translated into French and German: “Il brilgue: les tôves lubricilleux se gyrent en vrillant dans le guave …” and “Es brillig war, die schlichte Toven wirrten und wimmelten im Waben …”)

Children’s books and poems abound with sound words. There’s A.A. Milne’s, “Christopher Robin had wheezles and sneezles and they bundled him into his bed;” there are Roald Dahl’s books, with funny names like Veruca Salt and Willy Wonka, and candy bars called “scrumpdidliumptious.”

J.K. Rowling also played with words, as in her characters’ names: the good and wise Albus Dumbledore (“dore” suggestive of French “d’or” or gold), the evil Voldemort (“mort” suggestive of Latin “death”), and even the minor character, the French nurse, Madame Pomfrey (sounds like pomme frites?). I just could never understand why she named Harry Potter’s utterly loyal best friend Ron Weasley, since “weaselly” means resembling a weasel, and thus someone nasty and untrustworthy. For that matter, why was the famous school of wizardry and witchcraft called Hogwarts? (Hog+warts implies the opposite of something magical; was she being ironic? Why?)

I remember learning about sound words in elementary school and having to write a poem using them. Many years later I wrote a sound-word poem for my young niece; called “Mud,” the poem was later published in a children’s poetry treasury and went:

“Mud is gooey, SQuisshh patooey!
Mush it with your fingers, gush it with your toes;
Slimy, glimy, wet and grimy --
Oooohhhh! I love mud!”

(Still later the poem was made into a rap-style kids’ song, recorded by the deep-voiced man who played the evil plant in the movie, “Little Shop of Horrors” and you can hear it on this site (along with my “Gonna Sleep Like a Baby”):
http://www.bmsolutions.ru/cat/search/?section=0&author=Brad%20Ross&pp=100

What’s interesting about English sound words is how their usage can be categorized by the first two letters. For example, what do clink-clank-clunk have in common? Cl-words tend to suggest the sound of something sharp or metallic, like “clash” and “clang.”

The book I’ve found this in, “Vocabulary in Use” by Cambridge University Press, has explained this amazing aspect of word lore in a few short paragraphs. Take these opening sound word combinations:

Gr-words, as in “groan,” “grumble” “grumpy,” “grunt,” and “growl” suggest some unpleasant, or even threatening, sound or action.

Sp-words are related to water or other liquids, or even powder: splash, splutter, spray, sprinkle, and spurt. (That 50’s song: “Splish-splash, I was taking a bath”)

Wh-words suggest movement through air: whiz, whistle, whirr, wheeze, whip. And what do you say when you’re on a swing – “Wheeeee!”

On the other hand, words ending in “—ash” as in “dash,” “lash,” “crash,” and “gash” suggest something fast and violent.

So keep listening, word-lovers, for the sounds of your life: from the snap-crackle-and-pop in your morning cereal to the sound of silence – or maybe snoring – at night. And here’s to a good night’s sleep: Zzzzzzzz.

To the Irregular Past, and Back

2008-02-03T21:24:00.001-05:00

Here we are -- men, women, and children of the 21st century -- texting, talking, streaming videos, and listening to podcasts on our slick new cell phones, Blackberrys, iPods, and computers – but still using many basic nouns and verbs that are well over 1000 years old. That seems practically un-American! How could a culture so bent on “now” and “new” and “the future” still use words that can be traced back to the mists of time?

Obviously, people and their language can’t evolve as fast as technology. But what strikes me as cooler than an iPhone is that even a phrase like, “Here we are – men, women, and children” – is made up of words that were spoken by pillaging Vikings, the savage Goths, and the Proto-European tribes spread out over Northern Europe and Russia thousands of years ago.

So, if you’re with me on a little linguistic time travel, you might appreciate a recent Harvard study, published in the October 2007 issue of Nature and written about in a variety of newspapers and periodicals; in the study, researchers came up with a mathematical formula for predicting how long it would take an irregular verb (like write-wrote-written) to become a regular verb (like look-looked-looked). The researchers’ conclusion was that frequency of usage kept an irregular verb from changing: that a verb used 100 times less frequently than another is 10 times more likely to change over a given period. In other words, use it or lose it.

At this rate, for instance, the verb “to be” would take 38,000 years before someone would say, “I beed” instead of “I was.” The same formula said that it would take a scant 14,400 years for “thinked” to replace “thought.”

Of more imminent interest were words like “wed” and “forecast,” which were among 15 verbs that the researchers predicted would change to a regular-verb “ed” ending within the next 500 years. To test that theory, I did quick Google search with “they were wed,” which brought up 11 million sites, as opposed to 1 million sites with “they were wedded.” Change is afoot (“afoot” being first coined in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar.”) but not yet fully here.

Testing “forecast” vs. “forecasted” was not so accurate, since “forecast” is both a noun and a verb, so the Google results wildly in favor (103 million results) of the traditional “forecast” were skewed. However, the Free (online) Dictionary lists both “forecast” and “forecasted” as past tense options. And there were some 3 million other sites with “forecasted” in the heading.

I have also noticed that the verb “seek” has fans of the past tense “seeked,” though still more fans of the traditional “sought;” and “strive” is in the balance between the traditional “strove” and the newer “strived.”

“Irregular” verbs did not originate as such 1,200 years ago, when English was developing out of a West Germanic/Saxon dialect; rather, those verbs were following certain standard pattern and conjugation systems. The ones that we use now, according to Wikipedia, are remnants (or fossils) of those ancient rules.

The rules and patterns for these now-irregular verbs were gradually displaced between the years 1200-1600 by changes in English pronunciation, a period linguists call The Great Vowel Shift. It was during this time that past tenses started to use an “ed” on the end of most past tenses and participles. According to the study, the old verbs that entered unchanged into the new system were ones that were frequently used: rise-rose, break-broke, bite-bit, catch-caught, think-thought, etc.

The study’s rule of frequency figures that when a word is used often, it tends not to change because of natural correction. That is, children who unconsciously follow the regular past tense pattern and say, “I seed you” will eventually hear “I saw you” so much, that they will adopt the irregular tense without any trouble.

To develop their formula the Harvard researchers, two graduate students in applied mathematics in the Evolutionary Dynamics program, traced the status of 177 irregular verbs in Old English (think: “Beowulf,” 800 A.D.) through Middle English (1066-1450) to modern English (Shakespeare to now). According to their study, the 177 irregular verbs of Old English shrank to 145 irregular ones in Middle English, shrinking to today’s 98 irregular verbs.

The modern irregular verb list may be proportionately small (roughly 3% of all verbs), but it has some heavy hitters. The top ten most-used verbs in English are all irregular: to be-was/were, to go-went, to have-had, to do-did, to say-said, to see-saw, to take-took, and to get-got, plus the helping verbs, can-could and will-would.

But what’s curious about the “frequency” theory is this: according to the study, words like bake, climb, fold, reach, starve, and yield were irregular in Old and Middle English but have since become regular. Does this mean people between Middle and Modern English didn’t say those words very much? I don’t think so. In fact, maybe those words were used SO frequently back then that it was easier to make them regular. Who knows? The study does not address this point.

I myself did a small (in fact, microscopic) study on changing past tense verbs, for a Linguistics class at Hunter College back in 2004. In it, I surveyed the pronunciation variation of the past tense for the following: sneak, shrink, creep, dream, leap, kneel, dive, and sink. That is, do you say: sneaked or snuck; shrank or shrunk; crept or creeped; dreamt or dreamed; leaped or leapt; knelt or kneeled; dived or dove; sank or sunk?

I asked 9 people, ages 12-78, mostly family members or friends, with the addition of one hairdresser and the man in the hair salon chair next to me. The results showed that age was not a factor, since word choices varied within age groups; and for most of my survey group, both past tense forms sounded natural. One participant, a 28-year-old male, added that he was not above adjusting his preferences to certain situations. He said, “I might say, ‘I dreamt about you’ to a girl, just because it sounds more literary than ‘dreamed,’ which is the word I’d otherwise use.” (Ladies: Beware of men saying “dreamt!”)

One reason both verb choices sounded correct, I observed in the paper, was that because Americans tend to move a lot, there is a lot of mixing and mingling of pronunciation. Some people unconsciously change their words in a new environment, while others cling to their native-born pronunciation, and both forms are passed on to children.

As for sneak-snuck, I found that Edward Finegan, the author of my Linguistics class textbook, Language: Its Structure and Use was actually wrong: he said that the traditional past tense form of “sneak” was “sneaked,” but that “snuck” was a commonly accepted variation. However, I found that “snuck” was actually closer to the original Norwegian and Danish words that gave us this verb. “Snike” in Norwegian and “snege” in Danish used “snek and “sneg” respectively for the past tense – so “snuck” is actually the older past tense, and “sneaked” would be the upstart. (This was my first linguistic discovery.)

So, as we type, text, and otherwise click our electronic way through the day, you might appreciate how far those words have come to appear on your tiny, shiny screen. I’m not just referring to the technology that has brought us such newbies as “to google,” “to youtube,” and “to email,” (all spoken and spelled with the regular past “ed” endings). I mean, a simple “How r u?” which represents more than a millennium in the making.

Talking Time

2008-01-01T08:53:00.000-05:00

This Holiday Season

Take Your TIME

To Make A Difference.

The above message, from the tres chic Swiss French watch companies, Baume & Mercier and Torneau, is written on a fancy, blue silk banner that for the past month has been hanging on every lamppost in the heart of Midtown-New York, along Lexington, Park, Madison, and Fifth Avenues – and it has been driving me crazy at every turn.

If you are among the majority who fails to find anything grammatically awry with that phrase, then please take time to consider that phrase; but there’s no need to rush – just take your time.

Okay. Have you spotted how the banner has managed to mangle two “time” expressions and merge them into one – and one, that if you take time to think about it, makes no sense:

“To take your time” is a phrase suggesting that someone use any amount of minutes, hours, or days to accomplish something. (Ex: She took her time writing the cover letter to send along with her resume.) Note that “to take your time” is followed by an “ing” word, or gerund.

“To take time,” on the other hand, means to set aside some moment or other in order to do something. (Ex: How can you write a book if you don’t take time to write?) This phrase is followed by an infinitive, or “to + base verb form” (i.e “to come,” “to do,” etc. are infinitives).

The distinction between these two common expressions may sound subtle, but I’ve never heard or seen them confused before in conversation or print. Why now? Baume & Mercier’s/Tourneau’s banner should say either, “Take Time to Make a Difference,” (set aside some moments from shopping or partying to do something nice for someone else) or “Take Your Time Making a Difference” (meaning, take all the hours or days you need to do something nice for someone else). But the way they wrote it, the sentence means neither.

But that’s not the only thing that gets me.

What really gets me is, Not Even My Own Mother – that universal standard for judging something’s worthiness – thought this subject was worth wondering about, much less writing about. Supporting my normally grammar-conscious mother was a group of blank faces of seemingly well-educated, native English-speaking Americans who I tested the phrase on at a party. “Sounds okay to me,” was the general consensus; meanwhile, Mom suggested I turn my attention to bigger bloopers.

But if Mom had seen the size and quantity of those banners, she’d realize how big a blooper that phrase was. This holiday season I have taken way too much time pondering how Baume & Mercier/Tourneau could have let this linguistically unfortunate phrase slip through the various levels of corporate art direction and bureaucracy to have those banners end up on those lampposts.

Perhaps this phrase is an unwitting example of how language changes in the 21st century: It starts with a big, expensive ad campaign with millions of people uncaring or unaware of some grammatical slip as they walk past the words; in time, they start saying things like, “Take your time to watch TV,” or “Did you take your time to listen to the words on that CD?” In time, I suppose I’ll be able to guess what the person means. For now, it still sounds mangled. Or is it just me?

The generally blasé reaction to this banner seems proof that English is fragmenting and morphing right under our native-speaking noses. Some of us cling longer to our linguistic ways, only to realize that a living language is a verbal sandcastle at high tide. Things change …

Speaking of which … goodbye, 2007 and Happy New Year, everyone!!

Speak You Global?

2007-12-23T12:14:00.000-05:00

I’ve always liked the holiday cards that say, “Joy and Peace,” or “Season’s Greetings” in different languages -- Spanish, French, German, Italian, and maybe Greek, Russian, Chinese, or Japanese. And English – of course. The different words and expressions seem at once textbook-familiar but culturally exotic, even when the words are written in green and red ink and fashioned into the shape of a Christmas tree.

But I wonder how exotic the English “Season’s Greetings” seems to foreign speakers – my guess is: not very. According to a recent article in the Financial Times (Nov. 9, “Whose Language?”), roughly 1.5 billion people around the world speak English – that is, one-quarter of the world’s population -- and two-thirds of that number speak it as a foreign language and speak it reasonably well, according to linguist David Crystal.

For decades now, people from Mexico to Mongolia have been learning English as a foreign language – and not as some academic exercise (as is the case here in the U.S. with foreign languages), but as a survival tool; in fact, the Financial Times article calls English “the key to prosperity.” As the language of international business and commerce, English enables Nigerians to speak to Norwegians, Spaniards to Slovenians, and Uruguayans to Uzbekistanis. It lets street sellers in Cairo, Santiago, and New York hawk their wares and haggle with tourists; meanwhile, in sleek, glassy office buildings, English lets investment bankers sell stocks and equity derivatives by conference call to clients in Brazil, France, and Singapore.

Not knowing English limits your ability to thrive outside your village or country; knowing English brings possibility, opportunity – and the ability to fix your computer over the phone with a tech support operator in India. British linguist David Graddol says that the majority of encounters in English today take place between non-native speakers. “Indeed,” the Financial Times quotes Graddol, “many business meetings held in English appear to run more smoothly when there are no native English speakers present.”

This is not because foreign English speakers automatically understand each others’ accents: if one person has learned American English and the other British, that sometimes presents complications. In fact, a French woman living here in New York arrived speaking and understanding British English – but now, after ten years of concentrating on American English, she has discovered, to her great chagrin, that she no longer understands Hugh Grant movies.

Still, overall, foreigners have an easier time of it speaking English with other foreigners, particularly in business situations. Why?

What we’ve got here – particularly when work involves colleagues from different countries – is not standard English, the Financial Times says, but something called Global English. This form of English is different from everyday, conversational, idiomatic-expression-filled English of native speakers; instead, Global English uses words and terms that are generally recognized by those foreign speakers present; it forgives slight grammatical errors; and it is aimed at making sure everyone understands what is being said – not necessarily how grammatically perfectly they say it.

Linguist David Graddol says that “even the most competent foreign speaker sometimes leaves the ‘s’ off the third-person singular,” but that no real loss in meaning comes from saying, for example, “he come,” instead of “he comes.”
In a meeting filled with non-native English speakers, such a “variation” would be perfectly acceptable in Global English.

At the same time, the Financial Times says, “Native (English) speakers are often poor at ensuring that they are understood in international discussions,” due to their use of idiomatic expressions and slang: “Let’s knock this deal out of the ball park!” for example, could easily leave a few foreign colleagues in the dark.

I shared the Financial Times article with some of my corporate English language students (from Switzerland, China, France, and Latin America), and they agreed that meetings would be easier if the native-English speakers spoke more slowly and used regular terms and vocabulary.

One student, an Internet Technology manager from Argentina, said that in conference calls and at big meetings, “It is not hard to understand the foreign people, because they don’t know so many words and they also speak slowly,” she said. “But the Americans and British speak always too fast and use expressions I don’t know -- And then I get more nervous when it is my turn to speak.”

But English among foreigners also seems to vary according to whether the audience is mixed nationalities – or not. A Spanish-speaking lawyer from Chile said she was recently in a room with French lawyers speaking English with each other: “I could not understand any word,” she said. “They spoke English fast and in a French sort of way that is still English but English that only they understand.”

Meanwhile, a Colombian graphic designer stood up for the native English speakers in meetings: she said that native speakers of English at least have clear accents, good grammar and – most importantly to her -- get to the point faster. “Latin speakers,” she added, whether from South America or Europe, “love to talk, love to hear themselves speak.” This can be fine on their home turf and in their native languages, she said, “but in any meeting here that is in English, to listen to them (with their difficult accents and bad grammar), well, it is really hard.”

Even so, native English speakers should at least be aware of the potential for misunderstandings -- and vice-versa: A Japanese bond trader I once worked with recalled the time she had just joined a new office team to work on their project. “What do you want to get out of this project?” her team leader asked at their first group meeting. Not realizing the team leader was asking what she wanted to learn from the experience, the Japanese woman said, “I thought he was telling me to get out of the project. I almost left the room!”

As foreigners learn English, they might not realize when their skills are sub-par – with potentially disastrous results. Take the hilarious ad for Berlitz Language School found on YouTube: in the ad, a young, new-to-the-job German Coast Guard officer is alone at the radar panel when a British-accented voice calls over the radio: “May-day, may-day! We are sinking! We are sinking!” The officer, unsure how to react, leans into the microphone and responds in heavily accented English, “Siss is zeh German Coast Guard. What are you … sinking about?” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu-hW75wF4E)

Sometimes non-native speakers pick up English terms for things by hearing them from Anglo-American friends or colleagues; they then take these terms back to main headquarters -- only a bit altered. This would explain how our term, “touchy-feely,” meaning “ultra-sensitive,” arrived at a Zurich office as “touch-me, feel-me” – currently the large, corporate office’s name for long, in-depth meetings.

In another instance, a Belgian woman, describing her large, New York apartment, added that she loved her “walking closet.”

Other mistakes that non-native speakers make are things like mixing up verb tenses (“I have done not my homework last night.”); confusing “make” and “do” (“Sorry – I did a mistake!”); and translating word-for-word from their own language (“Finally, I must work all the day” – instead of, “In the end, I had to work the whole day.”) Pronunciation, word order, prepositions, and where-the-accent- falls-on-words are all killers too, because they are so irregular. Added trivia: The two words most often mispronounced and hardest to correct, in my book, are “women” (usually said as “two womans” or even “two womens”) and “clothes” (usually pronounced with two syllables as “clo-thes.”)

Such “differences” could some day become standard Global English -- if Global ever becomes a standard language. English itself developed over 500 years, as various foreign newcomers, merchants, and traders came to England and had to communicate with the locals. Over time, this meant pitching genders, the formal “you,” noun-adjective agreements, inflections, adopting easy and regular forms of plurals and past tenses, and all kinds of things that must have shaken each older generation’s foundations. (“Kids these days!” an old, Anglo-Saxon peasant might have said. “I work with my ‘Hande’ but my sons say they work with their ‘hands.’”) Global English could possibly develop in a similar way – except that English developed on one small island, where as Global English is developing all over the globe, making a standard Global English less certain.

In any case, to remedy the native/non-native language barrier in business communication, in 2005, a Frenchman and retired IBM vice president named Jean-Paul Nerriere invented a language tool that he called, “Globish;” this was not a language, he explained, but a simplified and codified version of English to be used at international business meetings. In his book, “Don’t Speak English -- Parlez Globish,” he explains how to learn and use this linguistic tool. Now two years later, Globish does not seem to have caught on, but Nerriere’s point is well taken: native English speakers in multinational business situations should hold back on the slang, long-winded jokes, and sports metaphors -- especially for games not commonly played overseas.

Americans and Anglos with thick regional accents are especially hard for foreign-speakers. On the other hand, good “standard” American accents are appreciated more than I once realized. For example, a young French student and his mother recently enjoyed the 1997 movie, “You’ve Got Mail;” though I had thought they would like the film for the scenes of the Upper West Side, their first comment was, “Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan were so easy to understand!”

What’s happening with English, in short, is that Global English is creating a new strand of the language, a new international strand. Global English and standard English are at a certain crossroads: on one hand, the “key to prosperity” still lies in speaking as much like native English speakers as possible. Global English may allow for mistakes, but ultimately, those who speak it strive for standard English perfection.

On the other hand, with non-native speakers of English being a new and growing linguistic majority, native English speakers just might have to make some adjustments if we want to be understood – and hold onto that slippery key to prosperity.

With that, allow me to be the first to wish you “Have a Happy Holiday” in Global English: “Happy Vacations!”

For those who prefer the more traditional multi-language seasonal greetings, you may take your pick: Cheers! (English) Feliz Navidad! (Spanish) Nollaig Shona Duit! (Irish) Meuilleurs Voeux! (French) S Rozhdestvom! (Russian) Glædelig jul (Danish) and Bom Ano Novo (Portuguese), Gelukkig NieuwJaar! (Dutch), Νέο Ετος (Greek), and ལོགསར་ལ་བཀྲ་ཤིས་བདེ་ལེགས་། (Tibetan).

(P.S. If you want to know how to say the above in Breton, Comanche, Galician, or even Kurdish, then check out this amazing site: http://www.omniglot.com/language/phrases/christmas.htm )

Verb Tension

2007-11-07T00:33:00.001-05:00

In one of the most unusual cases linking language use and government waste, Brazil made using the verb form they call “the gerundio” (gerund) officially illegal last month. What’s unusual is not that government workers spoke in such flabby, ineffective language that it provoked a reaction – but that the governor actually took the law into his own hands and did something about it.

Apparently, Brazilian Federal District Governor Jose Roberto Arruda was sick and tired of hearing government workers, especially phone operators at a government call center, add one or two unnecessary verb tenses to their responses; these extra tenses required unnecessary syllables, words, time, and of course, all that zapped their sentences of nice, crisp direct speech and turned it into what Arruda considered verbal mush – and a bit pretentious at that, sounding just a tad too much like the way we say things in English.

An online article from “Estadao.com.br” cited two examples of such wasteful speech, as in, “I am going to be transferring you, sir” which in Portuguese comes out: “Eu vou estar transferindo o senhor;” and another such phrase:, “”Nos vamos estar providenciando,” or “We’re going to be arranging that.”

Though such language does not sound at all unusual or “inefficient” to native English speakers, Brazilians actually could say it more concisely. In standard Portuguese, those same phone operators could say, “I transfer you;” or, at most, “I’m going to transfer you.” But stretching it out to “I’m going TO BE TRANSFERRING you” was, according to Arruda, an abuse and exaggeration of the gerund.

The gerund, according to an online article in the newspaper, “Folha”, is defined as “the noun form of the verb … that indicates continued action.” Such words end in “ndo” in Portuguese, similar to “ing” in English. In the sentence, “I like shopping,” “shopping is a gerund – a noun formed from a verb.
Another use of the gerund, according to the grammar book, “Portugues Contemporaneo” (Georgetown University Press), is as a verb form tagged onto the main verb to suggest duration of an action. For example: They have finished shopping,” with “shopping” as the gerund.

However, In the sentence, “They are shopping,” “shopping” is a verb participle – not a gerund – though lengthy online research proved only that the Brazilians consider them roughly the same thing – noun form, verb form – whatever …

In any case, on September 27, 2007, “by reason of inefficiency,” Governor Arruda made any further use of the gerund strictly prohibited, by Decree 28.314, as stated in the “Diario Oficial do Governo do Distrito Federal.”

The news broke a few days later. On October 2, Brazilian blogger Tania Carvalho wrote, “Well, I woke up today to discover that the governor … has basically fired the gerund! This (form of) the verb can no longer appear in any branch of the government of (the capital city) of Brasilia.”

Though Tania herself mainly informed her fellow bloggers of the facts and withheld any opinion herself, comments to her blog, “O Mundo e uma Aldeia” (The World is a Village), were varied:

(From Marcelo): “At least the gerund left Brasilia. Many others could go too.”

(Marco): “Don’t you think it’s crazy that (Arruda) forbids the gerund but allows so many other (bad) things to continue?”

(Beth): “Maybe the governor should worry about basic education instead.”

(Buzz, a social website): “It seems like a joke, but it isn’t.”

Arruda himself no doubt expected guffaws from around Brazil and the world -- when the news broke, he managed to be unavailable for comment, being at a World Bank conference in New York. But I give it to Arruda for taking a linguistic stand on government efficiency (or lack thereof) and then following through.

But what, you may still be asking, is so BAD about that verb form?

In English, we use the verb participle “ing” forms in the every configuration of present, past and future tenses: I am doing; I was doing; I will be doing; I would have been doing; I will have been doing. These tenses do not exist in that same form in most Western languages, except to a certain extent in Portuguese and to a lesser extent in Spanish.

Language expert David Crystal, in “Stories of English,” suggested that during the Middle Ages when English was still taking shape, there were so many different people speaking different forms of language – Norwegian, Danish, Saxon-German, Latin, Norman French, and more – that people came up with tenses to say exactly what they meant. In other Western languages, the tense is left mainly to context.

Let’s take a look at the tense that drove the Brazilian governor crazy: the present progressive. In English, we use the present progressive tense when we say, “I’m going to the store,” or “I’m reading the best book.” That tense means that we’re in the process of doing a particular, specific action – even if we’re not doing it at that exact moment. That is, you might be going to the store “this morning” or “a little later;” and you might only be reading that good book at night before bed, not at the precise moment you spoke about the book. But going to the store and reading that book are actions that still have yet to be completed.

In Brazilian Portuguese, you have the option of saying, “I am going to the store,” (present progressive) or “I go to the store” (present simple), though both mean the same thing.

In English, “I go to the store” sounds funny, unless it is given further context; that is, followed up by something like “every Wednesday” or “as little as possible,” or some other phrase that lets someone know you go to the store on a regular basis, and that it’s a fact.

The differences in English between these two tenses are so clear that no native speaker would confuse, for example, “What do you do?” (i.e. for a living) with “What are you doing?” or “What do you play” (implying an instrument, or sports position) with “What are you playing?”

But for foreign speakers learning English, these two verb tenses are not as easily distinguished. Both Latin languages and Germanic languages mainly use one tense, the present simple, as in “I go,” to cover both meanings.

The problem with those government workers in Brasilia was that they were adding, “going-to-be-doing something” when a simple “do” would have done. And that got Arruda’s goat.

The French newspaper of record, “Le Monde,” took note of the Brazilian gerund/participle ban in a small column on October 24: in it, columnist Robert Sole let loose with the smugness of a child teasing the losing team:

“All use of the gerund,” Sole says, “was just banished by the governor, Jose Roberto Arruda, who intends to fight against the inefficiency of public service …
The French administration will certainly be inspired by such grammatical politics, while knowing full well that we must respect tradition, that is, to leave the tenses to themselves … “

Sole compares the “gerund” form of Portuguese to the “en train de” form in what he calls his “language of Moliere.” That is, “Estou estudando” (I am studying) in Portuguese is “Je suis en train d’etudier” in French.

However, a random sampling of two highly educated native French speakers begs to differ with Sole: their feeling was that the simple “j’etudie” serves as “I study” as well as “I am studying.” “En train de” doing something does mean that you are in the middle of doing something, but because of the extra length of the sentence and the effort to say it, the expression is usually spoken in the same way that we say, “Well, I’m TRYING to study” – i.e., with a verbal edge that the Portuguese and English forms do not have in their present progressive tenses.

One possible concern to this whole Gerund Prohibition is that someone, somewhere will challenge Arruda’s loose definition of the gerund itself. If the Brazilian Ministry of Language decides that “gerund” and “participle” are two separate entities, then the whole decree may be swallowed up in one giant, linguistic loophole – and the problem, a Brazilian might say, will keep on continuing.

Peopleisation

2007-10-07T19:30:00.000-04:00

He has been described as a skirt-chaser; she as mysterious, capricious, and detached.

These are not the usual adjectives newspapers use to describe a new country’s president and his wife. And yet the new French president, Nicholas Sarkozy, and his wife, Cecilia, are as much an embodiment of the new generational change in French political power as they are symbols of the new word, “peopleisation.”

“Peopleisation” is not yet in the dictionary, but it already has a lengthy online Wikipedia description, including its various spellings: “pipeulisation, “ “pipolisation,” and the most current, “peoplelisation.”

Those are strange spellings because they’re French. Oui, and pronounced “people-ee-za-seeyon.”

I stumbled upon “peoplisation” in a conversation with a French lawyer I’ll call Veronique. She and I had started talking about President Sarkozy, or “Sarko,” as he is often dubbed, the first Baby Boomer President of France, and his wife, Cecilia. It seems that France’s new First Lady has displayed some rather unusual behavior before, during, and since this past spring’s election. And as Veronique got into the particulars of Sarko and Cecilia’s reported affairs, arguments, and odd conduct, I suddenly realized that she was dishing the dirt on them as if they were Brad and Angelina, or Tom and Kate, or Britney, K-Fed or any other regulars gracing the cover of People magazine (which does not exist in France – at least, not yet) or The National Enquirer.

This is what the French call “peopleisation”: it’s all about “celebrities,” not “people” as ordinary humans. “Peopleisation” is about the people who appear in what the French call the “presse people” – the “anglo-saxon–style” (French Wikipedia’s term) of weekly magazines and tabloid newspapers featuring people in the media, show biz, and in France right now, politics.

Voila “peopleisation” in French power and politics: On Sarkosy’s Inauguration Day this past May, the English newspaper, The Telegraph, gushed:
"Mrs Sarkozy looked more like a star arriving at the Cannes film festival than the matronly presidential consorts France is accustomed to.
Camera shutters whirred as the 49-year old former model, holding the hand of their ten-year-old son Louis, brought Jackie Kennedy glamour to proceedings in an ivory duchess satin Prada dress. Known to prefer T-shirts, combat trousers and cowboy boots, Mrs Sarkozy silenced at a stroke the critics of her dress-down style."

Though celebrity culture in France may have been around for a while, “peopleisation” has only emerged since around 2000 and is still not yet included in dictionnaire.com. As a word, “peopleisation” reflects a definite English/American embrace. Yes, the French long ago adopted “le weekend” and “le Burger King,” but “peopleisation is their own invention. They could have substituted a French word for “people,” but they intentionally stuck with our word – a linguistic nod to the inventors of celebrity culture.

The English newspaper, The Independent on Sunday, had this to say about Cecilia at the G-8 Summit in Germany this past June:

"Like the Devil, she wears Prada, like Marie-Antoinette, she fascinates and antagonises people in equal measure … At the G8, she dazzled photographers with her toned body in an Azzedine Alaia black-laced, strappy dress. Nicolas was very attentive, as always, holding her hand, while she stood, aloof, with a steely smile and fiery eyes."

Monsieur Le President is not without his own attributes: alliterative adjectives punctuate articles in both the New York Times and the Washington Post, who refer to Sarkozy as “passionate,” “pragmatic,” and “pugnacious.”

But others dish a little more deeply – take Judith Warner, author of several non-fiction books ranging from politics to modern-day motherhood, as well as the New York Times blog, “Domestic Disturbances.” In her Sept. 13 posting last month, Warner referred to the “attractive tableau vivant of family disorder exhibited by France’s new president, Nicholas Sarkozy, and first lady, Cécilia.”

Warner went on to explain some of the marital tensions that, in the U.S., might have destroyed a presidential campaign faster than you can say “cuckold” (an old English/Old French word referring to the female cuckoo bird, who is known to lay her eggs in other birds’ nests). Warner’s blog says:
"In case you missed it, Sarkozy last year greatly entertained France by running a campaign in which his wife was almost entirely absent. Cécilia, a former model whom Nicholas first eyed in his previous incarnation as mayor of the city of Neuilly, while administering the vows that consecrated her last marriage; she left him in 2005, eventually showing up – and being photographed – with her lover (a Moroccan advertising executive) in New York City.

The Sarkozys ultimately reunited. But life together remained rocky. Cécilia made major headlines once again last May when she pulled a no-show on the night of her husband’s final run-off race against his Socialist rival, Ségolène Royal.
She was rumored not to have voted at all."

Cecilia hit American radar this past summer when she snubbed President Bush’s invitation to a picnic at the Bush family manse in Kennebunkport, Maine; at the last minute, she backed out, explaining that she and her children had “sore throats” and could not attend the picnic: so Sarko went solo.

The Sarkozys had been vacationing 50 miles away in Wolfeboro, NH and, according to the Times Online/UK, fellow vacationers noticed Mrs. Sarkozy strolling in shorts around town with friends, both the day before and the day after the picnic. Le Figaro, the most pro-Sarkozy newspaper, noted drily that the infection seemed to have come and gone as fast as lightning, adding, "The day before she was in good form, and the day after she was cured."

Over here, newspapers and online blogs, magazines, and newsletters, from the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle to the Liberal Doomsayer to the Surf Wax News, commented on the “sore throat excuse” and gave Cecilia’s behavior a thumbs down.

A French Presidential term is five years – so just think of the rumors, gossip, and innuendos waiting in those Gallic wings. Not that it takes adultery and unconventional behavior in a Presidential couple to get our attention – but recent American history does prove that it’s pretty effective.

Bill Clinton would easily have been called “un lapid chaud” – or, “hot rabbit” – in France, during his administrations. Whether or not politicians-as-celebrities helps us elect the next one remains to be seen. Hillary is older and wiser and her relationship with Bill leaves little else to discover (I hope). Rudy and Judy? Spare me.

So far, “peopleisation” has only really touched Barak Obama -- as in the recent You Tube video sensation, “I’ve Got a Crush on Obama” in which a girl sings and fantasizes about how to get her favorite candidate’s attention.

In contrast, the past two French presidents both had tabloid potential in their lives, yet prior to 2000, the French press did not consider this type of news as peopleisation-worthy. Their transgressions made them human, not celebrities.

The German online magazine, Spiegel International (5/22/07), said of Francois Mitterand (1981-1995) and Jacques Chirac (1995-2007), “Mitterrand had a mistress and paid for her accommodation with taxpayers' money. Shortly before he died, when he admitted to having an illegitimate daughter by her, it only served to give the man many in France referred to as "God" a more worldy image. Mitterrand's successor, Chirac, also had a reputation as a bon vivant.” But these men tended to hide their private lives.

Now, reporters like to comment on Sarkozy’s “in-your-face” style, his hob-nobbing with millionaire friends, his Rolexes and vacations on yachts – and his total lack of embarrassment in enjoying the good life. In short, says New York Times columnist Roger Cohen, Sarkozy “has broadcast that money’s okay.”

That’s “peopleisation.”

Clearly, Sarko is becoming prime meat for the press and paparazzi. He is outspoken, volatile, loves America, listens to an iPod, jogs, and is part Napoleon-part JFK. The “peopleisation” of this President will keep Sarkozy on the front pages of French newspapers, and at least in the first section of American papers and blogs for a while.

It’s taken thousands of years for “peopleisation”, the word, to emerge. From the Latin, “populus,” the French came up with “peuple” for a specific group of people and “gens” for people in general.

“Peopleisation” does not seem like a very French word and it will be interesting to see how long it takes to be made official. The French verbo-crats are so careful not to let English words slip into their formal speech. In France, there is a Ministry of Language that forbids Anglo words to become part of elevated speech: for example, this machine I am typing on cannot be called “le computer;” oh no – only “l’ordinateur” (pron: lor-dee-na-toor) will do.

The same ministry forbids naming your child anything too “extraordinaire” – Gwyneth Paltrow’s daughter’s name, Apple; or Bob Geldof’s daughters’ names, Fifi Trixibelle, Peaches Honeyblossom, and Little Pixie, would never fly with in France. (However, the French lawyer I spoke with did know of a pair of twins who were able to keep their names: Starsky and Hutch.)

Still, I’m betting that the English word “people” will eventually be accepted by the official French dictionary, and maybe even by the Ministry of Language: only “people” conveys that gossipy, trendy, paparazzi-craven world we so take for granted, but which is so new to the French.

And when Sarko’s term is up five or maybe ten years from now, perhaps he and his wife will find a new way to stay in the limelight. Maybe a TV show: “In the French Kitchen with Sarko and Cecilia.” Nothing like a little peopleisation while cooking over a hot stove: a dash of marital tension along with a splash of white wine … The celebrity weeklies can start salivating now.

In Any Event

2007-09-09T11:17:00.000-04:00

Labor Day is recently behind us – and with it, that glorious state of mind called “summer.” People who haven’t seen each other in a while will be asking for another week or so, “How was your summer? Did you get away at all?” or “Did you have a good summer?”

By “good summer,” perhaps we mean “eventful” -- which Encarta defines as “full of important, interesting, or exciting occurrences; or something that had a major effect on your life.” On the other hand, a “good summer” could mean one of long, lazy days, lots of iced coffee, and reading beach books so l-i-t-e they floated away – i.e., a blissfully uneventful summer.

Eventful, uneventful, event … to ancient Romans, evenire, i.e., to come out of, or occur.

I’m thinking about the word “event” these days not just because my second child just went off to college for the first time (THAT was an event) and my first child just went back to college (very important, but less of an event than the first time), and we now have just one child (well, age 16) at home for the first time since 1989 -- there’s probably a name for this new period, but that’s a separate column.

No, what’s getting to me is the commercialization of the word “event,” which is diminishing the real meaning of the word. So what, exactly, is an event? Encarta defines it as 1. “an occurrence, especially one that is particularly significant, interesting, exciting or unusual; 2. An organized occasion, such as social function or sports competition; 3. Any of the races or other competitions that form part of a larger (sports or other) event; and 4. A happening or occurrence.

Now take a look at my Exhibits A, B, and C: I just drove through town and noticed the women’s clothing store, Ann Taylor, is having what they call, a “Shoe Event.” A few weeks ago, they were having a “Sweater Event,” and before that, a “Summer Sale Event.”

(Could the events of my summer even begin to compare to those?!)

Last week, The Body Shop was having a “20% Off Everything Event.”

Even pet shelter organizations like PetBond.com, and the giant Petco pet store chain, have gotten in on the “event” action with “Pet Adoption Events.”

Have these so-called events become a modern sales code word meant to avoid sounding crass or commercial? What Ann Taylor and The Body Shop are really doing, it seems, is “promotion” for one and “a sale” for the other. Has the word “event” become polite society’s expression for the equivalent of “blow-out sale”?

The release of the seventh and final Harry Potter book was commercial but, still, definitely an event, even a worldwide event – with children and grown-ups alike dressing up in Harry Potter character-related costumes, going to parties at bookstores that had book-related games, trivia contests, face-painting, and food – definitely memorable events, as was my own completion of reading the series.

Meanwhile, Ann Taylor’s “Shoe Event” includes no balloons, confetti, or live auction; no face-painting or speeches or anything to make the “event” in any way memorable or once-in-a-lifetime. All it means is that the new fall shoes have arrived, and that we should come in and try them on. The fall sweaters that were the featured “event” in August are still on the table near the door – but now considered a tad dated for the “event” crown. Mind you, those sweaters and shoes are still full price – any reductions will no doubt be announced with the Fall Sale Event.

As for the pet shelters and their Pet Adoption Events: these regular-as-morning-coffee happenings (though an event is supposedly a unique or rare occurrence) give people who want a pet an opportunity to acquire one. The shelter brings animals from their locations to a local pet store or town center. There, the shelter displays cats and dogs in cages, pens, and carriers and waits for hopeful owners to apply for ownership.

The potential owners are then thoroughly screened – they must fill out a lengthy application with many personal questions as to why they want a pet and how and where they intend to keep it, and keep it safe (from falling off balconies, out of windows, etc.); you must also supply references, which are duly checked: If your reference cannot be reached (not at home, cell phone on the blink), too bad -- either wait, or try again at another “event.”

Once potential pet owners have passed the paperwork stage, some shelters require a home-check: they bundle the pet-owner-wannabes into a van, then with a pet professional, go to each wannabe’s house or apartment to check for possible safety hazards.

They call this an “event”?! For those proud pet owners who make it through the entire process, bringing home the puppy or kitten is definitely an event. But the method of acquiring it -- while completely fair and humane for the animals – is more Trial than Event for the humans simply seeking a little love and four-legged companionship. (Perhaps the shelters could call these ordeals, “Attempt to Adopt a Pet Day.”)

Lifetimes are full of events – some are acknowledged with a hug and a surprise under your pillow, or a “How ‘bout that!” (losing your first tooth, not being picked last at gym). Other events are reasons for extravaganzas – bar mitzvahs, Sweet Sixteens, graduations, weddings, births. (And though death is equally dramatic and occurs just once per lifetime, I’ve never heard anyone refer to someone’s death as an “event.”)

County fairs are also full of events: Bingo; the 4H Poultry, Rabbit and Livestock Competitions; the tractor pull, the dessert cook-offs, the greased pig race, the watermelon-eating contest, and much, much more. Swim and track meets have different events within them; our local fire station had a festive little event today for parents and little children, with balloons, a train, face painting, spin art, sticker tattoos, and free food and drink.

Events are usually happy or fun – but not always. There is a tremendously popular children’s book series called, “A Series of Unfortunate Events,” which describes the bitter and painful experiences, disasters, and awful occurrences that challenge three orphans seemingly every second of their miserable lives.

The biggest use “events” as a negative occurrence is the one attached to to September 11, 2001: the terrible happenings of that day are often referred to as “the events of September 11th”. In this case, the word “events” is fitting – since it’s hard to find a date in American history with more drama or significance.

So my advice to Ann Taylor, The Body Shop, pet shelters, and other entities dressing up their promotions, sales, and rigorous adoption procedures in verbal sheep’s clothing is: delete “event” from your sales language. Unless you come up with something that has us consumers standing in line overnight; that can rival the first day of school in significance; or that can compete in emotional tension with a county fair’s husband-calling contest, it’s best to let our natural idea of events remain as special, happy, or even tragic as they are meant to be.

Endangered Semicolons

2007-07-08T14:15:00.001-04:00

It’s summertime, the livin’ is easy – right?

Well, it’s easy livin’ to some – but not to the poor semicolon, whose existence is fading as fast as the Polar Ice Cap but without a Live Earth Concert to protect it. (Witness the first line, above.)

The actual lyrics to the Gershwin brothers’ “Summertime” are, “Summertime, and the livin’ is easy.” The “and” between “summertime” and “the livin’” keeps the flow of the line going; it also links the first part of the sentence to the other.

There – did you see how I snuck in that semicolon?

A semicolon is perfect for when you have two related sentences without an “and,” “but,” or “or” to connect them; a semicolon tells you to give each related sentence equal attention – not just a comma’s worth of a pause – because a pause is sometimes just not enough:

Like in “Clueless” when Paul Rudd accuses Alicia Silverstone of driving through a stop-sign: “I totally paused!” she says in California-style self-defense. But, you see, a “pause” – whether on paper or on wheels -- is not the same as a more definite stop.

A semicolon between two sentences tells the reader that each part is sufficient to stand alone, but that there is a close relationship between the two parts that would get lost with a full-stop period. (A comma should not attempt to join two complete ideas – and I’ll get to that.)

In the excellent, humorous grammar book, “Woe Is I,” author Patricia T. O’Conner calls the semicolon “one of the most useful but least used punctuation marks,” and I have to agree. O’Connell also thinks people might be too intimidated to use semicolons, but I think that’s optimistic: (I put a colon there because a colon means, “now I’m going to elaborate.”) if people are thinking that semicolons intimidate them, then that means they’re at least thinking about semicolons. I don’t think most people even think about semicolons.

To those of us who remember watching “Leave It To Beaver” and “The Brady Bunch,” the semicolon probably dates back to some grammar lesson slept through years ago. Those born during the “Beaver” and “Brady Bunch” years probably did not even have a grammar class, so they now hardly recognize a semicolon’s existence -- except as a curiosity found in other people’s writing.

Willing as I am to accept that punctuation, like language, changes, losing the semicolon would indeed be a loss. Visually, semicolons carry more muscle than a comma. Commas don’t stop the flow – they simply regulate it, with changes of tone and pauses. Semicolons bring the flow to what O’Connell calls the “flashing red light” stage – a brief stop; they serve as connector-rods to strengthen a sentence.

The trouble is, people have found a way to live without them; but their writing suffers as a consequence. A semicolon is red meat, full of iron; a comma is lettuce – valuable, good for you, but light and somewhat flimsy, occasionally left to an author’s discretion or whim.

Transition words like “however,” “nevertheless,” and “anyway,” are always followed by a comma; commas separate asides, things that could also be put in parentheses; and commas, which are often forgotten in these cases, go before clauses beginning with “which.”

Commas also separate items in a list or series; but when that list already has commas and/or dashes in the items, use a semicolon. Like: Don’t forget to bring the popcorn, which I hid on the back shelf so no one would it eat before the picnic; the cream soda – mmmm; and a big blanket for the lawn.

Semicolons hold together two related sentences. A sentence, or “independent clause,” has a subject, a verb and a complete meaning. For example, “John reads” is a complete sentence, with a subject, verb, and complete meaning. Likewise, “Run!” is a full sentence, because it has all the elements of an independent clause: a subject -- in this case, an understood subject, which is “you;” a verb, “run;” and a complete meaning, which is along the lines of “You’d better get out of here fast!” In contrast, a clause like, “When you run” has a subject and verb but no complete meaning, so that is a “dependent” clause.

Newspapers articles tend to use periods, commas, and dashes. (We’ll get to dashes another time.) Semicolons are more often used in magazine articles and books. However, lately, in books or articles where there are plenty of properly placed semicolons, there are random paragraphs where they were left out. Either this is a dubious stylistic choice, or simply editorial neglect, I don’t know. For example:

*The book, “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus” is a perfect example of the spineless punctuation seen today. I could see if this were a list, like: Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and semicolons are nowhere. But as it is, the title lacks the bite a nice semicolon would have provided.

See if you can find the missing semicolons in the following passages:

In Philippa Gregory’s, “The Other Boleyn Girl”: “Whenever I looked up the king’s eyes were on me, whenever I looked away I was conscious of his stare still on my face.”

In Nick Hornby’s “How To Be Good” the husband says to his wife over the phone, “Yeah. Molly’s here watching TV, Tom’s round at Jamie’s.”

And in J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” a person quoted in an article in a Hogwarts newspaper says: “We’re not allowed to talk about it, don’t ask me anything.”

Moving away from literature and fixating on the warning on my cup of Barnes & Noble/Starbucks coffee, I see the following:

“Careful, the beverage you’re about to enjoy is extremely hot.”

Now, why did the coffee-cup editor put a weak, little comma after a warning? An exclamation point, or at least a period, would have been more appropriate for preventing drinkers from burned fingers and potential lawsuits. Grammatically speaking, a full-stop would have been the correct choice too: “careful” is actually a command and thus an independent clause with an understood subject (you) and understood verb (be), with “careful” a complementary adjective. “You be careful,” is what the word really means.

On a daily basis, I find plenty of semicolonless emails like:

“Here is the report, I hope you can understand it;” or
“Thanks for the update on Shelia, I was wondering what happened to her.”

You might argue that those lines, punctuated with commas instead of semicolons, sound the way people speak. But to me they simply lack muscle, or definition; they’re just not going to last.

Printed interviews often take the same comma-or-bust approach, which robs the speaker of the expression and intonation he probably better conveyed on tape:
In an online interview with Eric Zala who, with his two friends and fellow “Indiana Jones” fans, spent seven years, between ages 12-19, remaking “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” said, “My mom had this big rambling house and a huge basement which was perfect for our makeshift soundstage, where we would later shoot the bar, the cave, the Well of Souls, the map room, and we listened to a bad horror movie sound effect records, two 12-year-old kids getting inspired about the idea of doing our own Indiana Jones movie.

Still, it’s not too late to start a Semicolon Survival Campaign; it just might work. We can start with a little grass roots effort and build awareness from there. And by Summertime 2008 we might even see ”Punctuationfests” carried by satellite right to your living rooms, Palm Pilots, cellphones and iPhones from semicolonless spots all over the world.

Why “Oui”?

2007-06-16T19:28:00.000-04:00

I was lucky enough to be in Paris recently and after hearing, or responding with, the affirmative French word for “yes” for a few days, I began to wonder about that little word, “Oui.”

“O-U-I” is pronounced something like “we;” however, to sound more French, you must purse your lips tightly, then say the word while keeping your tongue as close to your front upper teeth as possible. (This gives “oui” a sharper, slightly breathy, and somewhat more nasal sound than the English “we.”)

But again, why “oui”? In France’s neighboring Latin-language-based countries like Italy, Spain, and Portugal they say “si,” “si,” and “sim.” Is France’s reputation for being different rooted even in its ancient linguistic development?

Apparently, oui:

It was the 12th century writer, Dante Alighieri (of “Inferno” fame) who first put France’s regional language variations into three groups, each group defined by the way they said, “Yes.” In the south, they spoke “the Langue d’Oc;” in the central and northern parts, “La Langue d’Oil,” and closer to Iberia (later Spain) and Italy, “La Langue de Si.” In his essay, “On Vernacular Speech,” Dante noted, “some say ‘oc,’ (awk) others say ‘si,’ (see) and others say ‘oil’” (oh-eel) – and his groups were each named some form of “The Language of “Yes.”

“Oc” comes from Latin’s “hoc,” or “that;” whereas “oil” is a combination of “hoc ille,” meaning “that is it.” “Si” came from the Latin, “sic” meaning “thus.” The “Si” group was relatively minor; the main choice was between “oc” or “oil.” With Paris being for centuries the main power seat and located in the Langue d’Oil region, it’s easy to see that the Oil group would win out over the Oc one (and “oil” eventually changed to the standard French oui). There was a brief period in the 1200’s when the Langue d’Oc, in southern France’s Provence region, was the mightier, with Provencal considered the language of literature and the roving “troubadours” or minstrels. (War and politics changed all that.) Still, the name Langue d’Oc lives on in the name of the famous Languedoc wine region, and also in the adjective “occitane” (meaning, from the “Oc” region); in fact, the French-based, international luxury body lotion and bath oil stores called “L’Occitane,” now have put Oc back on the map.

As for “Si,” the French did not dispose of it completely. Where the Spanish, Italians and Portuguese found “si” and “sim” fit to mean a resounding, “yes,” the French found it a useful word for contradicting a negative statement: “You’re not going to the meeting?” “Si*! I’m going, and you?” (*In this case, “si” means neither “yes” nor “no,” but something like “of course.”)

Having a special word like “si” is found in other languages too: The Germans do this with “Doch (Dok);” and the Norwegians use “Jo” (Yoo). Those of us whose language doesn’t have such a handy word must hobble along with more emphasis in our responses: “Don’t you like the food?” “Yes, of course I like the food, and in fact, I’ll have seconds” – just to clarify our position.)

Just why the French went for the Oc’s and Oil’s in the first place and rejected the Roman “Si” can be found (in my opinion – not documented) in any “Asterix” comic book. This French comic book series, started in1959 and now translated into 100 languages, takes place in Gaul in 100 B.C., when Julius Caesar invaded and occupied the land (now France). Gaul was named after the early Celtish tribe of Gauls living there. (The adjective and noun, Gaul, in French is “gallois”– thus the name of the popular French cigarette brand). The series’ main character is Asterix (whose name comes from the Latin/Greek “aster” meaning “star” + “rix,” Celtic for “king”), who is a funny little Gaul; along with his equally funny and oversized sidekick, Obelix, the two have adventures and exploits throughout the 33-book series in trying to outwit the never-as-clever Roman soldiers.
Though I doubt the real Gauls had as much fun as Asterix and Obelix, they most likely did resent the Roman intrusion: in fact, it took some 500 years for early French to replace Gaulish – and this included their refusal to adopt the Roman word for “yes.” True, the Celtic word for “yes” was lost (or, if Celtic Gaulish was like the Celtic Gaelic, an exact word for “yes” may have never existed); so if the Gauls were going to turn to Latin for an affirmative, then perhaps they thought it should at least be a different word than the “si” used by the obnoxious occupying Roman soldiers.

That the north of France would differ for centuries with the south of France on whether “Yes” would be Oc or Oil is mere sibling rivalry (like the English “yes” vs. “aye”); and leaving “si” for responding to negative questions almost seems like a French-style (and long-lost) in-joke. Tres funny, oui?

Coming and Going

2007-05-21T01:11:00.000-04:00

The saying, “I don’t know whether I’m coming or going,” implies that there is a sense of confusion in the life of the speaker. It’s like not knowing if you’re arriving or departing. Come and Go. We all know the difference -- don’t we?

I thought I knew the difference until I tried explaining it to several transplanted students from South America of mine who seem regularly confused by the way we use the two verbs in English. When I’ve tried to explain the difference, I’ve end up so muddled, I haven’t known whether I’m coming or going myself.

I thought this blog would be a good place to work out the confusion. And for those of you who have never wondered at the difference, well, it’s perhaps time for you to do so.

Here are some familiar situations in English that take some form of “to come:”

* Your kids are calling you from the car, impatient to leave; you shout back, “I’m coming!”

* You call up a friend and ask, “Can I come over this afternoon?”

*You RSVP over the phone to an invitation to a party: “I’d love to come.”

In Spanish, each of those situations would be handled with the verb, “to go.”
“I’m GOING!” you’d shout to your kids in the car as you rush out the door. “Can I GO to your house?” you’d ask your friend. “I’d love to GO to your party,” you’d say.

That’s because the Spanish verb, “ir” or “to go” means (according to Diccionario.com) to move from HERE to THERE – the same as “to come” in English.

According to Dictionary.com, “to come” means, “to approach or move toward a particular person or place.” In other words: to move from HERE to THERE. So a mom shouting, “I’m coming!” as she heads from kitchen to car is exactly right by English standards, but the opposite in Spanish.

According to DIccionario.com, the Spanish verb, “venir” (“to come”) means, “to
move from THERE to HERE.” So the kids waiting in the car would call, “Mama, VEN! (informal command) or VENGA! (formal command),” because she would be going from the house (there) to the car (here). Likewise, someone from Buenos Aires throwing a party would ask guests to COME (there to here): “Pueden VENIR a mi fiesta?”

Where it gets confusing is that in English, we say, “I’m COMING!” in response to someone’s call (HERE to THERE) and “I hope you can you COME to my party” (from THERE to HERE).

This means that English speakers use “to COME” for both COMING and GOING.

On top of that, Dictionary.com says that in English, “to go,” means “to move or proceed, esp. to or from something.” In other words: “to go” can mean from HERE to THERE as well as from THERE to HERE. By definition, COMING and GOING apparently mean the same thing – but we know they don’t. In fact, there is almost never any misuse or confusion. So why is this subject so confusing?

Let’s look at this in real life:

Let’s say John has a business trip coming up. He says to his colleague, “I’m GOING to Peoria.” Fortunately for John, he has a friend in Peoria he wants to visit while there; so he whips off an email saying, “Guess what -- I’m COMING to Peoria!” In both cases, John is departing from, say, New York, and landing in Peoria; but in the first instance, he’s “going” and the second, he’s “coming.”

The difference is this:

In the first instance John is heading to Peoria but he’s not talking to a person in Peoria -- both colleagues are in New York – so, he says he’s GOING. In his email, John is talking to his friend in Peoria; John is here, but his friend is there
-- so he says he’s COMING.

The difference in the two uses is whether there is a person (or people) at the other end of your destination – be it a friend in Peoria; your mom who’s called you inside to take a phone call; or if you’re explaining to your teacher why you came late to class.

Some more examples:

Two people invited to a party will talk with each other about looking forward to GOING to the party. But if you talk about the party with the person giving it, you tell her you’re looking forward to COMING to it. A store clerk who normally GOES to work might tell his boss he’ll be COMING in late the next day. The difference is the person at the other end.

The words, COME and GO, are of Germanic origin, whereas IR and VENIR are thoroughbred Latin words. (The French word for “future” is “avenir” – to come; and the word “avenue” is another derivative.) And In Spanish, the definitions correspond exactly with the usage.

Clearly, the Germans were a bit less specific about the definitions, and over time, usage has carved out its own distinctions. Since these distinctions are not noted in the dictionary, allow me to do so here: Use “come” when there is a person on the other end; use “go” when there is no person on the other end.

Is that clear?

Which is not to say life itself is clear. But at least for now I hope we know if we’re coming or going – and why.

Pragmatically Speaking

2007-05-04T00:09:00.000-04:00

For word-watchers, this past April was an interesting month to see what happens to people who don’t watch their words – and, in particular, the context in which they are spoken. Poster Boy for Blowing It Big Time was the radio shock-jock whose succinct, crude, and now notorious hyphenated adjective-plus slang plural noun so defamed the upstanding Rutgers Women’s Basketball Team that his show was first canceled for two weeks and then ultimately, forever.

Over in England, a mother’s hopes of having her daughter marry the prince were dashed, in part, by said mother’s unfortunate use of certain vocabulary words: These words were not monosyllabic, Saxon-sounding slurs or foul-mouthed interjections; rather, they were simply words and phrases (plus one action) that indicated that she was not “one of them” – which to the royals, raised the specter of an unhappy marriage due to irreparable class differences.

What these seemingly distinct cases have in common, however, is “pragmatics” – a branch of linguistics that studies how the meaning or interpretation of certain words can change according to context. Pragmatics is what guides our ability to change or modify our word choices and even gestures when speaking to a teacher, a friend, a baby, or a stranger who’s speaking too loudly on his cell phone. If you don’t pay attention to your audience, you may end up falling flat.

The morning that ex-radio host Don Imus spewed his gender- and racially charged remarks about the Rutgers women, he was talking by speaker phone to a male sports commentator as well as to the station’s listeners; he was also able to be heard by anyone who missed the show – including the Rutgers Women’s Basketball team –on the news and Internet. So, Imus’s audience, in the end, was actually men and women of all races in the New York tri-state area and, via the media and technology, the world.

The racist remarks he made that morning were not Imus’s first: In fact, the radio host had a track record that had been largely ignored in the past – mainly because he picked on people whose stature was big enough to handle the offense, not because it was any less offensive. But using those words to describe a team of hard-working, championship-playing young women athletes rightly – and finally! -- hit a nerve, and crossed a line. His nasty words sank like a slam-dunk into the wrong hoop.

Michael “Kramer” Richards of “Seinfeld” fame also needed a better understanding of pragmatics when he used racial slurs to lambast two African American audience members who annoyed him during his comedy act last November. Like Imus, he did not think pragmatically – and ended up sounding not like the edgy comic he possibly wanted to be – but more like Mel Gibson, who last summer made some equally offensive remarks about Jewish people, while being arrested for alleged drunk driving. The police officer, and object of Mel’s tirade, rightly did not appreciate those remarks – and Mel promptly landed himself not only in rehab but in a swirl of public outrage.

These days, course language is fashionably cool and hip. Movies, radio, TV, the Internet and email all use nasty words and blunt images. It seems like our society is Anything Goes – but it’s not. Filthy language is one thing; racist remarks, especially personal, racist remarks should not be tolerated and it was a boost to see society rise up and vanquish these perpetrators.

Meanwhile, the English mum, Carole Middleton, who had worked so hard to have her daughter, Kate, be the kind of girl to interest the English royal family’s Prince William apparently did not take her own words and actions into account.
According to a Royal Source quoted in the English newspaper, the Daily Mail (4/14/07), Carole Middleton “is pushy, rather twee* and incredibly middle-class. She uses words such as ‘Pleased to meet you,’ ‘toilet,’ and ‘pardon.’” (*Twee is a British word for dainty or pretty in an overdone and affected way.)
The Royal Correspondent for the Australian TV news show, News Idea, said that Mrs. Middleton, on meeting the Queen, should have said, “How do you do?” and not, “Pleased to meet you.” I’m guessing that even in proper BBC English, “Pleased to meet you” (and the reportedly pushy and socially ambitious Mrs. Middleton no doubt was pleased to meet The Queen) sounded a bit too chummy. “How do you do?” has such a nice, frigid sort of sound, and seems a more natural choice for people known for speaking about themselves in the 3rd person singular, as in: “One wonders if one ever thinks referring to oneself as ‘one’ sounds funny.’”

As for calling that sine-qua-non of necessary rooms a “toilet” instead of a “lavatory” or “bathroom,” well, the trouble with that word is simply that, according to the experts, upper crust English people over the age of 30 simply do not say it. Ever. Etymologically, there’s nothing crude about the word: the root is not “toil” or work, suggesting grunts or groans, but rather, the root is “toile,” (twahl) referring to a lacy cloth that was used to cover the dressing table, which the French called a “toilette.” Dressing oneself in French was called “to make one’s toilette,” and the word evolved from there. But at this point, even informal Americans go to the “restroom” or “bathroom” and only speak of the toilet when referring to the object itself.

Saying “Pardon” instead of “What?” was another of Carole Middleton’s verbal offenses, according to Sarah Lyall’s article in the New York Times. (Memo from London 4/26/07) Saying “Pardon?” makes a person sound like she’s trying too hard – and in the same way that, “If you have to ask, you can’t afford it” works, so does the idea that if you have to try to sound correct, you’re obviously, hopelessly not up to snuff.

And try – really, really try -- is what Carole Middleton did. Though her methods were different, Mrs. Middleton and the meddling, neurotic Mrs. Bennett, mother of the five eligible girls in Pride and Prejudice, could be distant cousins. News articles from the Daily Mail, The New York Times and others all cite Mrs. Middleton’s aspirations for daughter Kate, beginning with starting a mail order business twenty years ago – a business that catapulted the family from middle class to nouveau super-riche, enabling her three children to go to private school and on to any university that they could get into. Meeting Prince William seems not exactly unexpected on Mrs. Middleton’s part.

In fact, it was the perfect plan – and it almost worked (and that’s not to say it never will for Kate). But Mrs. Middleton, a coal miner’s granddaughter and former airline hostess, -- attributes that made mockery all too easy for Prince William’s upper crusty crowd -- neglected her pragmatics: and her lack of discretion coupled with the language of an arriviste were interpreted on the Royal Family’s side as strictly NOCD (i.e., Not Our Class, Dear).

"The irony is that Carole has been so busy pushing her daughter forward and doing her best to groom her for Royalty that she's rather missed the point that she might not fit in herself,” said the Royal correspondent for News Idea. He added that in addition to her language faux pas, Mrs. Middleton was seen at the formal Sandhurst Military College parade – the one in which Prince William marched this past winter -- chewing gum.

Chewing gum?! That is a type of body language that emanates the same strong message as its verbal counterparts – which is, that in the wrong context, such an activity is Just Not Done. At this point, it is probably a truth universally acknowledged that chewing gum is more than a tad tacky at formal functions. Did Eliza Doolittle slip a little Dentine into her mouth before the ball? Did Cinderella’s breath smell like Wrigley’s spearmint when she danced with the prince? Did Mrs. Middleton think the Queen wouldn’t notice? She could have at
least swallowed the gum before gushing, “Pleased to meet you.” One has to wonder.

Mrs. Middleton could have taken some tips from Nancy Mitford’s classic 1945 novel, The Pursuit of Love, a mostly autobiographical novel of growing up in an eccentric, aristocratic English family in the 1930s. Here is what the father (“Uncle Matthew” to the narrator/his niece, Fanny, who, unlike his own children, attends a regular school) thinks about formal education – and its influence on the decline of proper English:

“Education! I was always led to suppose that no educated person ever spoke of notepaper … Fanny talks about mirrors and mantelpieces, handbags and perfume, she takes sugar in her coffee, has a tassel on her umbrella, and I have no doubt that, if she is ever fortunate enough to catch a husband, she will call his father and mother Father and Mother. Will the wonderful education she is getting make up to the unhappy brute for all these endless pinpricks? Fancy hearing one’s wife talk about notepaper – the irritation!”

Coming to the rescue, Aunt Emily says, “A lot of men would find it more irritating to have a wife who had never heard of George III. (All the same, Fanny darling, it is called writing-paper you know-don’t let’s hear any more about note, please.)”

So you can see what Mrs. Middleton was up against. All the same, being British, didn’t she know? It’s not as if the English aristocracy has hidden their subculture or dialect from the world. In 1954, Ms. Mitford even compiled a glossary of Upper Class and Non-Upper Class words, which, though intended for a lighthearted article, nonetheless still carry the sting of reality for today’s wannabe royal mothers-in-law.

Upper Class Non-Upper Class
Bike or Bicycle Cycle
Dinner Jacket Dress Suit
Knave Jack (cards)
Vegetables Greens
Ice Ice Cream
Scent Perfume
They've a very nice house. They have a lovely home.
Ill (in bed) Sick (in bed)
Looking-Glass Mirror
Spectacles Glasses
False Teeth Dentures
Die Pass on
Mad Mental
Jam Preserve
Napkin Serviette
Sofa Settee
Lavatory or Loo Toilet
Rich Wealthy
What? Pardon?

Though it is now 50-odd years later and I am not sure what still applies to the general English verbal class distinctions today; however, the mere fact that such a list exists at all is unusual – and seems like something that could only happen on a small island nation with a fairly homogeneous society. How else to tell the social wheat from the chaff? But with all the changes going on there recently, perhaps this list will be completely obsolete in the near future. But for the moment, we shall have to leave it to the English to separate aristocrats from arrivistes through sofas and serviettes.

Build-A-Word

2007-04-19T00:31:00.000-04:00

Happy or unhappy? Filled with happiness or unhappiness? Taking on a lot of responsibility, or are you completely irresponsible?

You don’t have to answer those questions – but do take a look at how English builds words to mean one thing, and alters it slightly to mean its opposite; or to mean one thing as a noun, and another as adjective. We take a base word – like happy or responsible – and then add prefixes (little endings before the base word) or suffixes (after the base word) to make the proper changes and meanings.

What we don’t do much is to take full-bodied words or ideas and stick them together, two or three at a time, to come up with a single word. Germanic languages do this all the time. For example:

Got a safetystrikewood?

That’s the literal name in German for the little wooden stick whose rough, rounded end (dipped in a sulfur paste) creates a flame when struck against the textured surface of the little box it comes in. That’s right – a match, or a light. But in Berlin and Zurich and elsewhere in the Germanic world, safety matches are called Sicherheitszundholzer (zee-here-HIGHTS-ZOOND-holtser) – a name practically longer than the object itself.

And if you happen to be in Germany and feel the need for speed, you might want to drive on the Autobahn, or highway, where there is no Geschwindikeitsbegrenzung ((guh-SHVIND-i-kites-begrens-sung), or speed limit.

And speaking of driving with long words, some American friends of ours who have been living over in Holland report, “We routinely receive bureaucratic mailings with words of up to 25 letters in them, such as the pretty straightforward ‘vergunninghoudersplaatsen’” or “permission-holder-plate,” or ‘license plate.”

English could not possibly come up with such long names for anything -- we start choking on words longer than “surreptiously.” But our German and Dutch language cousins glom together nouns, noun endings, adjectives and other syllables to create a new word or give the old one an added meaning. This type of linguistic pile-on is what so astounds, assaults, and baffles English speakers trying to learn these languages. Mark Twain once said that some German words are so long they have a perspective, and for once he might not be exaggerating.

Nevertheless, Germanic long words should not be confused with English’s big words (last posting’s topic). Big words are the longer, less familiar words that can substitute for shorter, more common ones; these words can be fairly short but still sound inflated or pretentious: “obtain” instead of “get” Or a phrase like, “I recommend that we hasten our exit,” instead of, “We should get going!”

For length, even fancy, Latin-based English words, like “beautification,” “romanticism,” and “inauspiciously” are usually not more than 15 letters and four or five syllables long, being strung together with one base word plus a little prefix and/or suffix. In the end, English prefers language the way the crow flies – direct and fast, with the easiest words and the fewest syllables possible. Long words, like big words, are not really nurtured in our tongue.

Yes, long words exist in English, but mainly as scientific or medical terms. We take a Greek or Latin root – say, “derma,” which is Greek for “skin” and then add an ending, or “suffix” to describe, say, an expert in the study of skin -- and zing! --we get “dermatologist,” or “skin doctor.” To make that word longer, you might be able to become an expert in the study of elephants; for this word, English takes the Greek, “pachyderm” for elephant (which literally means “thick-skinned”), adds the proper suffix and we’ve got a “pachydermatologist.” Of course, if you wanted to be an expert in elephants’ skin, you could possibly then become a “pachydermadermatologist.”

The longest non-scientific word in English is “antidisestablishmentarianism; that 28-letter, 12-syllable whopper is not, however, a “ big word.” If that word is used at all (outside of a spelling bee or crossword puzzle), it is probably in some context referring to its meaning – a 19th century movement involving the Church of England. It’s just not something that can be switched for a more common term and dropped casually into conversation.

In fact, the word “antidisestablishmentarianism” does not really make sense: broken down, its 2 prefixes, “anti” and “dis,” are two negatives, “against” and “not;” + establish (a verb)+ment (making establish a noun) + arian (turning it into an adjective) + ism (turning it back into a noun, and specifically one meaning an action, process or practice – like terrorism or favoritism). So you’ve got the original establishmentarianism, and the movement against it – disestablishmentarianism; so if the antidisestablishmentarianists are against the disestablishmentarianists then are they PROestablishmentarianism? If so, they are merely the regular “establishmentarianists.”

Breaking down German words is easy in comparison. Let’s go back to “match” and “speed limit.” You might be wondering how Germans could take two such ordinary, everyday ideas and morph them into such consonant-crammed tongue-twisters. Here’s how:

Sicherheitszundholz:
Sicher (zee-here) means “sure” + heit (an ending, like “ness”) + zund (zoond) “strike” (as in the action with the stick against the box) + holz (holts) “wood.” So a match is a surenessstrikewood.

Geschwindikeitsbegrenzung:
Geschwind (guh-SHVIND) seems to start with the word, “Wind” (just like our own word); tack “sch” onto Wind for Schwind” which suggests “dizziness;” add “Ge” to “schwind” and you’ve got “fast” or “rapid;” + “ig” (a suffix, like speed-Y) + keit (an ending, like “ness” to make it a noun); meanwhile, Begrenzung comes from the word for “border,” which is “grenze;” and a “BEgrenzung” is a boundary. So “speedynessboundary” to them becomes “speed limit” to us.

It’s a whole different approach to word-making than English.

Let’s say you’re in the mood for something sweet; you go to the “Backer” (pronounced “baker”) whose specialties include pie crust (“Geback”) and pastries, or “Feingebackenes,” or roughly, “finebakedthings.” Let’s say you can’t decide what tasty treat to choose, so you ask for a finebakedthingsselection, or, “Feingebackenesauswahl.” (“Wahl” means “choice;” aus (out) + wahl = selection.)

Meanwhile, there are other languages with long words, including llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch; this 58-letter Welsh word means "The church of St. Mary in the hollow of white hazel trees near the rapid whirlpool by St. Tysilio's of the red cave.”

The longest place name in the United States is a little lake in Webster, Massachusetts with the official Native American 45-letter name of Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg; locals say the name means, “You fish on your side; I’ll fish on my side, and no one fishes in between,” though no Algonquin expert exists to vouch for that translation.

And yet the Welsh and the Algonquins – separated not only by an ocean, but by completely different racial, linguistic, and cultural roots – both created specific place names by linking meaningful words together, rather than separating them with space or a hyphen; and behold – two names, both almost impossible to pronounce but which allow for no confusion as to which town, or which lake one was talking about.

Meanwhile, I challenged some of my Swiss German students to come up with some words longer than antidisestablishmentarianism, and they easily offered:

Fussballmannschaftsspielerinnen = football (i.e. soccer) + man + (“schaft” – a noun ending) = team + spiel (play) + er (player) + innen (feminine ending, plural) – (thank you, 8-year-old Sina!) 31 letters;

Hauptstrassentunnelabschrankunge = main-street-tunnel-barricades (for stopping traffic into a street’s tunnel) 32 letters;

And tied for first place with 38 letters each:

Schifffahrtsgesellschaftsangestellter = ship-travel-company-employee (aren’t those 3 “f’s” in a row fffantastic?!); and

Versicherungsgesellschaftsvorsitzender = insurance company big boss (or literally: the one who sits in front of everyone)

In Mark Twain’s 1880 book, A Tramp Abroad, he mentioned that a North German man had a word of thirteen syllables surgically removed from his throat, though ultimately the operation was not successful.

But what all languages do seem to share is the ability to break down and build up words as needed, through the adding or subtracting of different prefixes, suffixes, or word parts. It reminds me of those Build-A-Bear stores, where you can make your own stuffed animal. You begin with a lining (bear, tiger, or Hollywood movie tie-in product of the moment), add stuffing, a voice box (or not), and clothes. You make the choices and make the stuffed animal just the way you want it. Words are not so custom-built, but if they were constructed in a store like the stuffed animals, a typical morning workshop might go like this:

Shopper: I’d like a word – something that describes the process of making a neighborhood go from being a terrible pit to something … nice.
Clerk: We’ve got “pretty.”
S: No, that’s an adjective. I need something to describe the process.
C: Well, that would be a noun. Hmm. You could start with “beauty” but you’ll need an ending for that.
S: (looks dubious) And add what: i-f-y? Beautify? No, that’s a verb. How about adding f-u-l, for “beautiful” and then …
C: We’ve got a stack of noun endings right over here, fresh off the truck. Here’s your “m-e-n-t” pile; here’s “n-e-s-s” and “s-h-i-p” --
S: SHIP?
C: Yeah, you know – friendship, citizenship – Ah! here’s a great stack of “if-i-ca-tions.” Play around with them, and I’ll check back with you.
(a little later)
S: I’ve come up with “beautification” but it sounds too garden-y. My word has to express that the whole population of the neighborhood changed.
C: Populification? That’s not a real word -- but new words are on sale today.
S: No thanks.
C: Let’s try some other Latin form for “people” or “race” – gens, gentis. Gen … generation, general, gentry – ah ha! Here you go: try this: Gentri …
S: Gentri --?
C: Now, stick on the ending of your old word –
S: Gen-tri-fi-ca-tion? Yes! Gen-tri-fi-ca-tion! Perfect! I’ll take it.

Of course, in German, Algonquin, or Welsh that might be something like Peoplemoneyspiffupneighborhoodbringnewproblems. And bingo! A new word.

Beware of BIG WORDS

2007-04-03T23:48:00.000-04:00

In English, when we speak of “big words,” it’s generally not a good thing. “Big words” – words usually of Latin or Greek origin that are not instantly understood, are hardly ever spoken or even pronounced properly – are the verbal equivalent of fake jewelry trying to pass itself off as the real thing. Big words are out to impress, mislead, or intimidate – but most often they just confuse and annoy. Don’t get me wrong: I love a good, rich vocabulary – but big words are mere pretenders to the throne.

English, having been created by the peasant masses – not royalty or the upper classes -- is not a language where long, fancy words can safely camouflage themselves in daily conversation. Words like “get,” “have,” or “do” serve so many linguistic purposes, they’re like maid-butler-gardener-and-chauffeur all in one; the minute an “obtain” or “possess” or “accomplish” appears instead, it is quickly taken in for questioning: was that word necessary, or is the speaker trying to put on airs?

Big words happen when we forget who we’re talking to. A humorous, small business website demonstrates what happens when big words are left to their own devices:

In promulgating your esoteric cogitations, or articulating your superficial sentimentalities and amicable, philosophical or psychological observations, beware of platitudinous ponderosity.
(See: http://www.abcsmallbiz.com/funny/big-words.html)

Even with a plethora of English words to choose from, words like “plethora” stick out – anyone hearing or reading that word would think, “Why didn’t she just say ‘a lot’ or ‘gazillions’?” “Plethora” is the kind of word we learn when studying for the SATs but never really say. In general, English speakers prefer to hear and speak their language straight up with a twist, and easy on the high-fallutin’.

Speaking of pretension, Dictionary.com offers a Word of the Day to all interested in building up their word power. However, given some of their recent choices, I have to wonder if the motivated student wouldn’t be better off reading a checkout counter weekly, like the National Enquirer -- at least those deliver descriptive words you can use: a woman “seethes” with rage (when her 60-year-old husband runs off with his 18-year-old sister-in-law); a celebrity might “brandish” a broken martini glass at an intrusive paparazzi photographer; a well-known politician might have recently been accused of “perjuring” himself on the witness stand. Meanwhile, Dictionary.com offers such baubles as:

roborant
autochtonous
clerisy
animadversion

Most of us can go a healthy lifetime without ever using one of those words. (Or, anyone want to play “Dictionary”?) A few weeks ago, without having checked the link myself, I had recommended Dictionary.com’s “Word of the Day” to a motivated French student, a data technologist; in an email last week he asked how he could use these words, either at work or elsewhere. I told him that Harry Potter couldn’t even use them for spells, and to cancel his (free) subscription.

It’s funny, though, that “big words” in English are not especially long; the Dictionary.com words above have no more syllables than other, more regular words like beautiful, intelligent, and authoritative. What makes a word “big” is its lack of familiarity, and the reason it’s not familiar is probably because we have a shorter word or simpler phrase to explain the same thing.

For instance, most people would probably refer to “a 70-year-old man” before calling him a “septuagenarian.” Weathermen can talk about “precipitation” but we generally call it “rain;” just as a movie reviewer might call a movie “extraordinary,” “astounding,” and “magnificent,” whereas fans might just say it’s “great.” Still, if those words are used in a proper context and add color or meaning, they can come out as clean and clear as, well, “clean” and “clear.”

But using fancy terms to impress listeners invariably does just the opposite. In the mystery novel, “Death of a Bore,” by M.C. Beaton, a pompous, second-rate writer attempts to explain his craft to a room full of practical Scottish highlanders:

“Perhaps we will discuss linear progression,” the writer said.
“Do you mean plot?” called Hamish.
“Er, yes.”
“Then why not say so?”

There are times, however, when the formal phrase serves a purpose. One occasion is the written acceptance to a formal party, and the standard, Emily Post reply is downright Victorian:

“Clara Jones and Joshua Smith accept with pleasure the kind invitation to the …” (insert: birthday party, bar mitzvah, debutante ball or whatever), etc. Using this format might sound retro, but it is easy for the respondent, since you don’t have to think of anything clever to say yourself – and you can ad lib informally, if you like; it’s also useful for the party planner, since it immediately says who the potential guests are, and whether or not they can come; and yet the language and structure acknowledge the formality of the event in a way that “Yes, we can come!” simply cannot.

One of the first times I came across a big-word style expression was when I was about 10 years old and reading an Archie comic book. Smithers, the tuxedo-clad butler to spoiled, rich Veronica Lodge had apparently reached his limit and said to his boss, Mr. Lodge, “I wish to tender my resignation.” Tender his resignation? I figured Smithers meant, “I quit” but I realized with that fancy phrase that Smithers was, in short, keeping his cool. Saying, “I quit!” would have sounded angry and emotional, whereas tendering his resignation helped Smithers maintain his butler-ish dignity.

Still, there’s a limit on what we can tolerate, and some of the world’s worst writing appears not in our children’s research papers or book reports, as might be expected by fledglings, but in what could be considered the Capital Cities of Big Words: business, law, and government. There, big-wordy emails, memos, forms, and other documents can get so loaded with jargon and bloated verbosity as to make readers groan in pain.

One such intolerant reader was Martin Cutts, an Englishman who in 1979 stood in London’s Parliament Square and shredded official documents – the first act of the Plain Language Commission, for which Cutts is owner and director. Ever since the document-shredding, this organization has published books and articles, as well as provided writing services to companies worldwide – with the goal of clear, accurate writing.
(See: http://www.askoxford.com/betterwriting/plainenglish/?view=uk.) (In fact, language and grammar sites abound on the Internet – it’s just a matter of taking advantage of them.)

So how do you know when you’re using Big Words, and when you’re sounding erudite? A first step is to ask yourself if you understood what you wrote. Next, ask someone nearby to read what you wrote. Then try it on your boss. These are not full-proof steps, but they do provide an initial screening of sorts.

As you write, remember that some of the best writing and most treasured lines in literature were short and straightforward, though absolutely eloquent:

Take Abraham Lincoln’s three-minute-long “Gettysburg Address” (‘Four-score and seven years ago our forefathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”); or Jane Austen’s opening to Pride and Prejudice: (“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune should be in want of a wife.”); or Scout’s description of her town in “To Kill A Mockingbird” (“Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired, old town when I first knew it.”) No big words there. The first two samples are formal, but clear; the third, so easy to understand you can almost feel the flies.

In short, if big words are bad jewelry, then it’s better to keep your language plain and simple than to be caught casting swine before pearls.

Gaelic Go Bragh!

2007-03-16T00:53:00.000-04:00

We were talking about the CVS pharmacy chain at dinner the other night, and my 15-year-old son was extolling the stores’ amazing virtues, not least of which was that they seem to be found anywhere with a population over 500: “They have everything a person needs,” my son gushed. “Shampoo, aspirin, food, candy, magazines, wall-to-wall carpeting, and prescription drugs. And anywhere you go, every CVS is exactly the same!”

The English language could already be the CVS of the linguistic world: It’s got Latin, Sanskrit, Old Germanic, vocabulary from all over the globe, volumes from Shakespeare, American musical songs from Rogers & Hammerstein, rock and roll words, technology terms, old words with new meanings, new expressions with old words; and you can find English spoken just about everywhere; English is the common language of India and the corporate world in general; it is the principal language link between all foreigners; and it even serves as a link to people who speak the same language but with different accents, as in:

A French student of mine was once standing in line at the post office in Paris, while a man from the south of France was asking the clerk for what sounded like, “Taym-bra,” (instead of the more nasal standard French pronunciation of the word, “timbre”); the clerk, flustered, barked out, “Tell me in English!” and the southern French man immediately barked back, “Stamps!”

So, yes, in some ways English, like CVS, is wonderful -- convenient, safe, and certainly fills many needs. Still, aren’t we all a little disappointed when a store closes and we imagine what we’d love to see take its place … only to find out it’s another CVS (or bank or real estate office)?

At this point, most of us Americans take it for granted that people from other countries will most likely speak English, or at least be acquainted with it. And who can blame us? Think back to the Mayflower pilgrims for a minute. As the story goes, those pilgrims who survived that first horrible winter in the bitter wilds of the New World, where for thousands of years only thousands of Native American tribes had been living and speaking their tribal languages, were greeted in the spring by the Wampanoag native, Squanto -- who actually spoke English! (He had been kidnapped some years before and had spent time as a slave in England.) As my kids would say, “How random is that?!” And yet I’ve never read of Miles Standish’s amazement at this coincidence – did he simply cluck, “Quite right!” to himself and then ask about proper farming techniques?

So … as we arrive at the annual celebration of the Irish, St. Patrick’s Day, it’s time to give some thought to this day from both a cultural and a linguistic point of view – if only as a small, temporary antidote to the CVS-ization of American-Anglo language and culture.

The Irish, as the saying goes, are lucky: Even as somewhat goofy as St. Patrick’s Day is (though I love men in kilts playing bagpipes; and also love cupcakes with dyed-green frosting and dark green sprinkles), I can’t think of any other group of hyphenated-Americans that gets a whole national day of celebration as the Irish do every March 17 – parades, green beer, a dyed-green Chicago River, even green bagels – from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon. As for St. Patrick the man – who’s he?! St. Paddy’s Day in the U.S. is about being Irish – even if you’re not. And though I have never bought a green carnation or a “Pinch Me, I’m Irish!” button in my life, to the whole event I say, “Erin Go Bragh!” (Irish Gaelic for “Ireland Forever!”)

The reason for my enthusiasm is, Ireland might be forever (or until the predicted effects of global warming wash the island out), but their Gaelic language might vanish far sooner.

At the moment, Irish Gaelic is on the list of Endangered Languages (http://www.helsinki.fi/~tasalmin/europe_index.html) Figures vary:
According to the UNESCO Red Book on Endangered Languages (last updated 1999) there are perhaps only 20,000 speakers of Irish Gaelic left; According to a 2005 book, “Beginner’s Irish” by Gary Rosenstock, there are 30,000 native speakers and 100,000 speakers who have learned it as a second language. This could mean renewed interest since the last UNESCO survey, or just … different figures. But one more thing: there are three Irish dialects (Ulster, Connaught, and Munster) of which most only speak one. Still, there is an Irish radio station catering to all three dialects and an Irish TV station (http://www.tg4.ie/).

In Scotland, according to the UNESCO report, more than 50,000 claimed to know the language, but less than half spoke it actively. Welsh, the healthiest of the Gaelic groups, might have up to 250,000 regular, active speakers. So though this doesn’t spell immediate doom for those Gaelic branches, either could die out in a generation or two if children do not learn the language. Though children are now being taught Welsh in school and more adults are interested in learning it, it’s too early to tell if this will stop the erosion completely -- but it’s a good sign. After centuries of being beaten back, Gaelic is finding some muscle.

Once upon a time the Gaelic language, culture and literature ranked just behind the Greeks and Romans. Though the Celtic tribes that spoke Gaelic were mainly fierce warriors and not too meticulous at writing everything down, they did have a strong oral tradition; and what they did manage to write down has been collected and treasured in their many Irish myths, as well as in the original legend of King Arthur, a 6th century Celt and Gaelic-speaking warrior himself.

Irish Gaelic’s fall began long, long ago with the English colonization of Ireland in 1169; Anglicization intensified in the 1500’s – King Henry VIII even issued an order to Ireland in 1537 entitled, “An Act for the English Order, Habit and Language,” which discouraged Gaelic. By the 20th century, children who slipped up and spoke Gaelic at school were punished. Even parents came to realize if their children were to succeed in the world, they had to speak English – not Gaelic. And once a language is no longer handed down to the next generation, its lifespan is severely limited.

David Crystal, a leading language authority, believes that of the world’s roughly 6,000 languages, a good half of them could vanish in the next century or so from the mere lack of speakers – some have fewer than 1000; those on the verge of extinction may have 100 or 10, or even just 1. And once those speakers are gone, the language is gone too. Two other forms of Gaelic, Cornish (from England’s Cornwall) and Manx (from the Isle of Man) have already died out.

What helps languages survive is having people believe that the language is important enough to speak regularly and properly and to pass on to their children. Cultural pride helps – and a national celebration like St. Patrick’s Day can nurture Irish pride, and interest in Gaelic might go along with that.

Gaelic, despite its strange spellings and difficult pronunciation, is an Indo-European language like English. Linguists more knowledgeable than I am can see a correlation in some of Gaelic’s words for words in Sanskrit, one of the bases of Western languages.

But Gaelic is different from other Western languages in many more ways than it’s similar. It only has 18 letters (no j, k, q, v, w, x, y, z); and most simple sentences go verb-subject-object: “Saw I a play last night.” Nor does the language have distinct words for “yes” and “no.” That’s why, in answer to a question like, “Are you going home for dinner now,” you might hear an Irish person say, “I am;” or, “I’m not.” Welsh Gaelic is said to be a particularly melodic language, and the influence can be heard in their English:

In the movie version of “My Fair Lady,” Professor of Phonetics Henry Higgins is astonished at the natural language ability that Eliza Doolittle’s boozing, panhandling father has; at one point, Mr. Doolittle, exasperated at not being able to explain why he wants a little money from the professor, exclaims, “I’m willing to tell you! I’m wanting to tell you! I’m waiting to tell you!” Higgins, moved by the rhythm and alliteration in “willing,” “wanting,” and “waiting,” says to his friend, Col. Pickering, “That would be the Welsh strain in him.”

But let’s go back to that prediction that of 6,000 languages in the world now only 3,000 will be spoken in a hundred years. I find it hard to even name more than 25 languages off the top of my head, you too might think that 3,000 languages are an absolute wealth of words. But language is not just about tourists or business people communicating with native speakers and other foreigners. It’s about diversity -- as much as is saving the snow leopard and blue whale. Animals have it over languages because you can see them – and when photographed by National Geographic, they’re often really cute. A language, on the other hand, particularly one down to its last dying speaker, leaves just an invisible breath; if that language is lucky, there might be a field worker’s notes on its grammar and vocabulary. Otherwise, a world simply evaporates.

So on this St. Paddy’s Day, consider treating yourself to a nice, green-frosted cupcake adorned with a small plastic shamrock, and take a moment to appreciate the Irish – or perhaps some other nationality or ethnic group – be they Laplanders, Outer Mongolians, or Cherokees. Every language reflects a unique spirit, history, even fashion sense. And imagine that every time a language is lost, a new CVS opens up in its place.

P.S. Three-quarters of what I know in Irish Gaelic has already been displayed with “Erin Go Bragh;” but walking up the Bowery the other day, I added one more word to my vocabulary -- thanks to an Irish bar by the name of “Slainte” (pronounced Slahn-tya, also in Scottish Gaelic), which means “Cheers!”

And in honor of St. Patrick’s Day, here are some handy Irish Gaelic proverbs with English translations to keep in mind:
(Sorry, but the Gaelic pronunciation is anyone’s guess)

Is minic a bhris beal duine a shorn.
“A person’s mouth often broke his nose;”

Na diol do chearc la fliuch.
“Don’t sell your hen on a wet day;”

and

Maireann croi eadrom I bhad.
“The light heart lives long.”

A top o’ the morning to you all …. And Slainte!

Greening Up

2007-03-04T23:16:00.001-05:00

I’m feeling green. And that’s not just because St. Patrick’s Day is soon; or that spring is suddenly in the air after a few weeks of a long-delayed winter. That’s using “green” in the traditional sense – green as in the color of grass or the face of the Wicked Witch of the West. Green from the Old English word, “grene,” which is akin to the ancient Indo-European word for “grow,” in the sense of “the color of living things.”

The green I’m also feeling – the one that has officially gone Hollywood, and therefore mainstream -- is a newer meaning of “green” -- that of being environmentally sound or earth-friendly. (Dictionary.com gives 16 other definitions for this adjective;) If you saw last week’s Oscar Awards, then you know that the event producers tried to be as “carbon-neutral” as possible; and that Al Gore won an Oscar for his global warming documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.” A few weeks earlier, Prince Charles and Camilla flew to New York on a commercial jet instead of a private one, in order to reduce their “carbon footprint;” and a recent picture of our Pro-Oil President George W. Bush smiling (albeit, uneasily) while – finally! -- holding up a vial of corn-grown ethanol (even though he held it as though it were urine).

Almost every day, I see something or read an article about our new “greenness”: on a recent trip to Boston, for example, I saw what looked like an oversized pine- colored garbage can that called itself a “solar-powered trash compactor.” And in my hotel room was “The Consumer’s Guide to Effective Environmental Choices” put out by the Union of Concerned Scientists – the first hotel literature I’ve ever seen to directly challenge the Gideon Bible for bedside table space. Personally, I find all this very heartening and long overdue.

Since the first Earth Day (April 22, 1972), anyone overtly environmentally conscious has been dubbed a “treehugger” or “a granola.” Though those terms still exist, they may start to fade, as concern for the environment becomes a part of everyday life and no longer a political statement. With that, I already hear a new vocabulary sprouting – with familiar words in new combinations or with new meanings to aid and abet our awakened awareness.

For instance, an environmental firm’s website uses “green” as a verb, describing how to: Green Your Home; Green Your Business; Green Your Event; Green Your Travel; and Green Your Building. I’m fine with making “green” a verb. The only thing I’ll add is that people will probably start to attach “up” to the verb because to green UP one’s home sounds more natural than to simply “green” one’s home.

In any case, the name of this green-as-verb company is the Bonneville Environmental Foundation, and it is from the BEF that the Academy of Motion Pictures purchased “renewable energy credits” to offset the 250,000-pound “carbon footprint” that it took to produce the Oscar Award telecast and the week’s related pre-show events. This footprint was measured by a “carbon calculator” that took into account the amount of carbon dioxide spewed into the air from (I suppose) the gas and electricity used to bring people to the event; to produce and roll out the red carpet; spotlight the celebrities; beam the show into living rooms around the world; and afterward, to keep the stars’ champagne glasses both clean and filled.

A 250,000-pound carbon footprint, the BEF said, is like driving a car around the earth ten times – which is why the Academy purchased “carbon credits,” or “carbon offsets,” which go toward investing in renewable resources like wind, solar, biomass, and low-impact hydropower. (Wow: “Low-impact hydropower” – have you ever said that before? See what I mean about this new vocab?!)

In time, as “greening” becomes ever more integral to our lives, we may start hearing remarks that sound utterly pretentious now, but may lose that tone in the future. Remarks like:

“We considered buying a classic 90’s McMansion, but between the central air, tile floors*, and the cathedral ceilings, the green-up would have cost a fortune.” (*The newest thing in earth-conscious homes is to have hard-packed, dirt floors. See New York Times, Feb. 8, 2007, “Down and Dirty.”)

Or another: “Their wedding was totally green, but the carbon offset to honeymoon in Bali almost broke their budget.”

Savvy green consumers might start to see ads, say, from a garden store: “It’s our Happy Earth Day Sale-a-bration! Buy a solar-powered, all-natural diesel-enhanced lawn mower! 30% percent off and includes $100 in carbon credits.”

Restaurants might also get in on the act. Just as some restaurants now tout “heart-healthy” meals, we might start seeing numbers beside each dish detailing the number of “food miles” used to convey the food to your table. Or patrons might ask the waiter, “Could you tell me the carbon footprint of the house special cheeseburger?”

Packaging, from canned soup to staples, may have to carry carbon footprint details so that consumers can make more earth-conscious choices: locally distributed brands vs. national brands made in Sri Lanka, flown to California, and trucked to Des Moines, Chicago, or New York. Will “carbon footprint miles” become CFM, or “footprintage”? Keep watching.

Clothing stores may also one day reflect this new consciousness, since it takes 1800 gallons of water to produce the cotton in a pair of jeans, and 400 to make the cotton for a shirt (See ct.water.usgs.gov/EDUCATION/waterfacts.htm). Though I can hardly imagine any current stores, from the Gap to Ralph Lauren to Burberry saying this, perhaps stores of the future may brag, “These shirts are made from organically shade-grown hemp and produced with low-impact hydropower.” We laugh now – but didn’t we all laugh at Steve Martin in “L.A. Story” (1991) when he asked the waitress at a restaurant for a “half double decaffeinated half-caf with a twist of lemon.” Though his order sounded hilarious at the time, at this point, it sounds pretty reasonable.

Pretty much all of us can rattle off our cell phone numbers, email addresses, and/or cholesterol. So before too long, we’ll be calculating carbons as naturally as we count carbohydrates. And should your carbon footprint count be lower than mine, well … I’ll be “green” with envy.

Addendum:

After writing this posting, I discovered that this week’s Time magazine’s cover story is titled, “Forget Organic: Eat Local.” I know some of you word-watchers will want to know if “eat local” is grammatically correct, because it sounds at first like it should be “eat LOCALLY.” Normally, an adverb should describe a verb, and in a sentence like, “We rarely eat out and when we do, we eat locally,” locally is used correctly, as an adverb describing where they eat. But in Time’s case, “Eat Local” really means, “Eat Local (Produce),” with “produce” being the understood object; so “local” is an adjective describing the understood noun “produce,” which is fine. Phew! As Sesame Street’s Kermit the Frog once sang, “It’s Not Easy Bein’ Green” – or grammatically correct.

Is Anybody Listening?

2007-02-20T00:18:00.000-05:00

In these times of heightened security, transportation hubs have had to come up with recordings to remind us of the ever-present danger in either watching another traveler’s bag, or having another traveler watch our bag while we go get in line for a latte or chase after a child. Such warnings are, I suppose, understandable, even if the danger feels remote at the time. The problem is that the language chosen to convey these loud, perfectly articulated, and oft-repeated admonitions reaches for such official sounding intonations that they end up mangled, and worse – ungrammatical!

For instance, I’ve just come back from a quick trip to Minnesota. Not surprisingly, my plane was delayed and, while in the waiting lounge of Hubert H. Humphrey Airport with about 200 fellow passengers, I was treated every few minutes to an overhead recording urging everyone to “patrol” their baggage: “All passengers should patrol their baggage at all times.” Can you imagine a waiting lounge with passengers “patrolling” their unmoving carry-on items, taking perhaps four or five steps forward past one’s briefcase or diaper bag, then four or five steps back? Talk about chaos!

My question is, if no one is laughing, or even making quizzical looks at each other on hearing such nonsense, is anyone really listening?

In Grand Central Station in New York, a similar recording is played equally often, and I always cringe at the word “attended:” “Atttention passengers: All luggage and packages must be attended at all times.” Personally, I thought people attended church or the opera. Dictionary.com agrees and adds that a nurse may attend (administer care to) a patient, and a fever may attend (or accompany) a cold. In each of those cases, “attend” is a transitive verb, which means it must take a grammatical object (church/opera; patient; cold are such objects in the sentences above). So that even if one can, say, “attend one’s health” (though I have never heard the word used that way -- somehow, “Put down that Big Mac and attend your health!” just doesn’t sound right) grammatically, it’s correct, with “health” being the object of “attend.”

Not so with “luggage and packages must be attended at all times.” In this case, luggage and packages are the joint subjects with no available object. That is why my ear is always straining to hear the little word particle, TO, following “attend.” It would be so nice to hear, “All luggage and packages must be ‘attended TO’ (to take care, give attention) at all times.” But, alas. It’s like listening for the final note in Beethoven’s 5th – Da-Da-Da (“Excuse me, sir, we need another “Da!”) and not getting it.

On my New York/Minneapolis flights (both to and from), more loud recordings, these recited in a deep, male voice following the slightest turbulence and upon descent, always jolted me from my half-sleep: “In compliance with federal regulations, please return to your seats.” The problem here is that “in compliance with federal regulations” is a phrase with nothing to link to – a lonely, dangling prepositional phrase; the subject of this particular awkward sentence is an unspoken, but understood, “you,” (“you” being the one asked to sit down). But where does “in compliance with” go? Does it describe the subject, “you” or the verb, “return”? Neither, really.

What the deep-voiced intoner means, I think, is, “TO COMPLY WITH federal regulations, please return to your seats.” But is anyone really listening? Or, (now I’m thinking of that Chicago song: “Does anyone know what time it is? Does anyone really care?”) Or are we just tolerating this mumbo-jumbo because we are passive passengers just happy to be aloft?

Still, these three announcements are perfect illustrations of why it’s important to say important things in plain, old English. If you want your message understood by people, then keep messages simple and avoid Latin-based words of more than two syllables. Why not have people write official-sounding warnings in plain English, with words and phrases that actually mean something, and with few or no Latin-based words allowed: “Passengers, please WATCH your bags; or – for variety’s sake – “Please HOLD ONTO your bags.” For in-flight requests, a nice, deep voice might advise, “Please get back to your seats – for your own safety.”

As my plane back to JFK stood at the gate before departure, I eased my seat back just a smidgen, for extra comfort. Within seconds, a sharp-eyed flight attendant had spotted my infraction and asked me to place it back in its full, upright position. Later, as I pondered the prerecorded announcement about compliance, I wondered if I, as Language Lady, were simply the verbal equivalent of that annoying flight attendant, ever aware of the slightest flaw. (Please – don’t feel you must comment! It was just a passing thought.)

In any case, in New York, we are exhorted on subway signs and commuter rail posters to speak up when we see something strange, with the public service campaign, “If you see something, say something;” and, in Spanish, “Si ves algo, di algo.” Perhaps we could do with a parallel public service campaign for catching strange uses of the English language while trying to warn people about strange somethings; this campaign could be called, “If you hear something, say something.”

In other words, we must band together and speak out against dangling prepositional phrases, the lack of objects with transitive verbs, and jarringly wrong words trying to sound more fearsome than the more natural choice. Watching our language , while making sure that it is concise – and above all, clear – could ultimately contribute more to our national safety than, say, 200 glassy-eyed passengers not patrolling their packages in compliance with federal regulations ever could. Do you hear me?

Presiders and Deciders

2007-02-12T00:27:00.000-05:00

With President’s Day just around the corner; and with more presidential candidates popping up daily – not to mention the media’s reminding us almost as often that the United States is now starting on the longest presidential campaign in our history, it seemed time to talk about things presidential. First off the list – and what could be more presidential? – is the word “president.”

I’ve often wondered how George Washington (one of this month’s two famous presidential birthday boys), came to adopt this term. Up until 1787 no ruling authority in any land had ever been called anything but some form of “king” (from the Old English, “cyning” (pron: kooning), which came from the ancient root, “gen,” for “family” or “kin”); or “queen” (derived from the Indo-European root, “gwen,” for “woman” – though in Old English, the word, “cwene,” pronounced “queen,” also meant both “wife” AND “prostitute.” Hmmm.) But our country’s founders felt that all monarchs were “inherently evil,” according to Jospeh Ellis in his “Founding Fathers.” In fact, the American Revolution had been fought to RID our country of such monarchs, so a new word for the position was absolutely imperative. “Republican king,” the original term, according to Ellis, was not it.

“President” according to Dictionary.com, goes back to the 14th century, when it meant “governor;” some scholar back then must have combined the Latin words, “prae” (in front of) with “sidere” (to sit) to define the job: “to act as head or chief.” In essence, a president is supposed to “preside,” or supervise, be in charge of, or officiate. (There were many more synonyms listed in Roget’s New Millennium thesaurus, but I did not see “wiretap without permission” anywhere on the list.)

Up until President Washington took on the title,, there had been college presidents as far back as 1464, and presidents of individual colonies starting in Pocahontas’s Virginia in 1608. But 1787 marks the first use of “president” meaning Chief Executive Officer of a republic.
Notice the verbal distinction between an authority figure meant to “preside” rather than “rule.” In preside, there’s an element of reasoned control rather than the often whimsical and selfish motives so often the legacy of kings.

Cut to 218 years later, however, and we have President Bush referring to himself as “The Decider,” a term he uttered at a press conference in April 2006, when he declared that as The Decider he would keep Donald Rumsfeld on as Secretary of Defense. “The Decider” still sounds funny, or stupid, or both. To me, it sounds childish – a three-year-old just learning how to speak might see that his mom cooks, so she’s the cooker; or that his dad shaves, so he’s the shaver. George Bush thinks, I decide – so I’m the Decider. In fact, most adults would have gone with the more standard “Decision Maker.” Better yet, how about The Presider – one who could emanate a quiet but confidant authority – something like a leader.

But now that the longest presidential campaign in history has begun, let’s take a Language Lady-look at what’s going on with two of the most talked-about candidates:

Rhymes with Iraq
At my fingertips as a I write is a February 9, 2007 copy of the German-language, Swiss newspaper supplement, Das Magazin, and I thought I’d share some of the terms the cover story uses to describe the newly announced presidential Democratic candidate from Illinois: The subtitle of the article says that this candidate is “jung” (pronounce “j” as “y” and it sounds just like our same word, “young”), schwartz (black) and perhaps the “nachste” (pronounced “next-eh”) Mann im Weissen Haus (man in the White House). Barack Obama, the magazine says, is “der Superstar” of “amerikanischen Politik” (American politics) and “bringt” (brings) “Schwitzen” (sweat) to, or rather, is making female Presidental candidate Hillary Clinton break out in a sweat.

Das Magazin reporter Peter Haffner then starts the main text by saying that the candidate’s first name rhymes with Iraq; that his middle name recalls that of a recently hanged dictator; and that his last name sounds similar to the most sought-after terrorist in the world; and that all together, Barack Hussein Obama is the phonetic embodiment of the American nightmare. And yet, the article adds, this man has a good chance of being President Bush’s successor.

Not only successor: The title of the article is “Der Erloser,” or The Savoir.” Yes, as in Jesus. I wondered, given how closely German and English are related, just how “Erloser,” with LOSER so central and prominent, could mean something so opposite. The German word, “losen,” with an umlaut over the “o” making it sound more like “loozen,” means to “untie,” or “loosen,” or basically, to come undone. But stick the prefix “er” on it and it makes it the opposite: to bring together, unite – or, in a bigger context, to redeem and save.

Now, In addition to calling himself The Decider, our current president --the most polarizing president in recent history – also claimed he was “a uniter” (In a May 1999 interview Bush said: “I showed the people of Texas that I'm a uniter, not a divider. I refuse to play the politics of putting people into groups and pitting one group against another.”) Well, I suppose we should be grateful that he hasn’t claimed to be anything more grandiose. Whether Barack – who openly refers to God and his personal faith in the Almighty – ever calls himself “The Savior” remains to be seen.

Rhymes with Pillory
Then there is Hillary. Last fall, prior to the November elections, our senator’s “Re-elect Hillary” posters and bumper stickers deliberately left off her maiden and married last name. With the single name, “Hillary,” she joined the ranks of such last-name-less celebs as Cher, Madonna, and (at least for now) Britney, Paris, and Lindsay; that way, we could almost forget that the former Hillary Rodham was married to the scandal-tainted, former President Bill Clinton. Hillary, it seems, wanted to be re-elected as Herself.

But now that Hillary has declared herself an official Democratic presidential candidate, the little words “Rodham” and/or “Clinton” are creeping onto her campaign posters and other paraphernalia. “Hillary” still dominates but perhaps she now wants the possible booster-connection to her hubby, who these days is widely seen as a post-Katrina humanitarian, a man of the people, and a down-home boy, whose intern-related disgrace nine years ago seems, after six years of Bush-patrol, pretty innocuous.

But whatever Hillary does, it seems she does the wrong thing. Her decisions seem so connected to polls or the majority opinion that, when those opinions change, she changes her stance faster than a driver trying to avoid a dog in the road. If she leaves Bill’s name off her posters one time, the next thing you know, she puts him on. If she puts on a strong, assertive front to win the senate seat, the next thing you know she’s being told she’s too masculine in her efforts, that she should take advantage of her femininity. Next thing you know, she’s in Iowa meeting with women in someone’s living room. If she’s told she’s too cold and ambitious, then she attempts warm and fuzzy; but when her official HillaryClinton.com website came out a few weeks ago, reviewers derided her as fake and a poor actor.

Maybe Hillary simply wants no enemies. But it comes off as is The Vacilator. Or the Greatest Common (and Power-Amassing) Denominator.

Just last week the fashion designer Donnatella Versace chimed in, saying that Hillary should stop wearing pants,* especially in blue, and go for knee-length dresses instead. No doubt Hillary will be soon sighted looking like some Breakfast at Tiffany’s “Hillary” Golightly in a not-so-sleek black, knee-length cocktail dress.

But even if Hillary happens to wear some tasteful, fitted suit, someone will no doubt make some crack about her having fat legs or fleshy knees, and she’ll revert to *trousers:” (Donnatella actually used the word, “trousers,” which the British seem to favor over our “pants;” “trousers” comes from the Scottish Gaelic “triubhas,” the name for the tight-fitting breeches worn (sometimes) under men’s tartan kilts).

You could say that Hillary is a real sucker for words – that is, other peoples’ words. It would be great if we could have a woman president, and one we could dub The Listener – who could listen to other experts and make well-informed decisions. What we don’t need is a Chief Executive Hearer. The difference between “hearing” and “listening,” as with “seeing” and “looking,” is a question of focus and attention. And we don’t need a President who behaves like a hearing aid that picks up all the background noise and none of the foreground.

As for Das Magazin’s jibe that Barack’s candidacy is making Hillary break out in a sweat, my father would have begged to disagree: “Horses sweat; men perspire; and ladies … glow,” he liked to remind me.

But back when ladies glowed, a women and a black man were not running for president. We’ve still got about 600 days to go, so it’s a bit early for any of us to be Deciders on Winners. So I say, Hail to the Chief Presider, whoever (s)he may be!

Gender Specific

2007-02-05T01:11:00.000-05:00

Back in the misty days of 7th grade, first-year French I remember a particular class somewhere in the middle of the year in which a boy, Willie C., raised his hand and asked, “Why are ‘question’ and ‘problem’ feminine but ‘book’ and ‘paper’ masculine?” This question seemed to hit a nerve: up until then we had obediently accepted this seemingly random categorization of nouns into male and female words but had not the faintest clue why. Willie’s question prompted an outpouring: who decided that ‘pen’ and ‘pencil’ were masculine, but ‘door,’ ‘roof,’ and ‘window’ were feminine?” Why was ‘the wind’ masculine and ‘war’ feminine? and so on. Ultimately, was this a boy-girl thing, or what?

The teacher calmly – but firmly – told us it was strictly grammatical, nothing personal. There was an edge in her tone that said, “Don’t ask me anymore.” (Perhaps she thought looking any deeper would stall the growing Women’s Movement?) A few years later I found out that Spanish had a similar masculine-feminine randomness but at least it was visually easier to tell male nouns from female nouns.

In college, when I started taking German, I discovered that language not only divided nouns into masculine and feminine, but neuter as well. I didn’t try to make sense of the categories – including why “girl” was neuter; instead, I simply tried to master the differences by color-coding my vocabulary sheets – I wrote masculine words in red; feminine in green; and neuter in yellow. (Bad idea: by the time I took my exam, I couldn’t remember if a word were green or red or yellow and botched the whole thing.)

But despite what my French teacher said, I am not convinced” that “gender” and “grammatical gender” have nothing to do with each other – why would they both be called “gender”? And if it weren’t a male-female thing, then why are nouns called masculine, feminine, and yes, even neuter – and not just Type A, B or C?

Some languages – including aboriginal Australian and Polish – distinguish between animate and inanimate things, in addition to the usual masculine, feminine and neuter. (And one aboriginal language even has a noun category for hunting weapons and dogs.)

Given that languages and their genders were formed in prehistory, the reasons for categorizing nouns and corresponding parts of speech into genders have been lost to time. My guess is that people began classifying each other as “masculine” or “feminine” and then started extending the classifications to other things, with each culture deciding what had male qualities and what had female or neuter qualities. Mixed in with spiritual beliefs as portrayed in say, Disney’s Pocohantas, -- i.e. that one’s ancestors could be reborn as animate or inanimate objects -- could have lent further chaos among those early “language deciders.” Imagine: “Tree is feminine – that’s my grandmother.” “Are you kidding? Look at that tree – big, strong, straight up! It’s masculine!”

Thus, for example, “tree” is masculine in French, Spanish, and German but feminine in Portuguese, and neuter in Norwegian. Different cultures, different perspectives.

Still, after a while people must have given up trying to see the “maleness” or “femaleness” or even neutrality of a noun and instead just randomly gave it a gender. That might explain why the Portuguese “tree” is feminine but their word for tree “trunk” is masculine – the Whatever! Syndrome no doubt set in.

English has a “natural gender” style – anything that isn’t a living-breathing male or female human, or domestic pet, is an “it.” What could be easier? Yet does that make our language and culture free of gender distinctions and contradictions – no way! The Women’s Movement has helped change a lot of words or terms that once defined roles or jobs that belonged predominantly to one sex or the other -- words like, “chairman” and “stewardess” have become “chair person” and “flight attendant.” Even “actress” and “waitress” – with French-inspired feminine endings – are beginning to be discarded in favor of simply “actor” and “waiter.”

The one pronoun English needs now is for a singular gender-neutral third person, singular, possessive, which would rid us of dilemmas in sentences like: “Each employee must fill out his/her own time sheet.” At this point, the choices are either the awkward “his/her” or the ungrammatical “their.” Linguists have come up with some suggestions but, just as English itself was formed, the masses will ultimately make the decision over time.

Women have already forged ahead with how they choose to be called in business when a courtesy title is necessary: Some married professionals go with Ms. and their maiden names; some with Ms. and their married names; some with Mrs. and their married names. All are accepted.

As more women appear in powerful positions in government – and sooner or later as leader of the Free World – it will be interesting to watch our genders change with the times: Madame President? (too French; and there’s the association with “madames” in “other” types of houses) Ms. President? or Mrs. President? Mr. First Gentleman? Or Mr. First Man? I guess we’ll cross that gender-bender when we come to it.

Your Word Order, Please

2007-01-28T23:48:00.000-05:00

Do you speak Starbucksian? I am not simply referring to the ubiquitous, upscale coffee chain’s now famous, and much-written-and talked-about words for their small, medium, and large cups (– i.e. tall, grande, and (trademarked) venti – words that many people find pretentious to use, but actually have some basis for being: for example, a “tall” is 12 oz., two ounces more than the usual New York coffee cup. (See “grande” and “venti” explanation further below).

What I’m concerned about today is word order -- the word order necessary to get the drink the way you want it: take what my daughter, Alice, ordered the other day: a tall, sugar-free, skim, 2-Splenda, no-whip, cinnamon Dolce Latte. Alice is 17 and has been drinking coffee for about a year – when did she acquire such verbal, “barista-speak” sophistication?

In 2005 Starbucks put out a free guide to their beverages called, “Make It Your Drink” – a tiny treasure I happen to own. Some of my foreign students back then would go to their nearest Starbucks but felt their English, and especially Starbucksian English, was too weak to order much beyond plain coffee or tea. (And as a Spanish-speaking student once explained – and marketing students, please take note: “I always order the ‘grande’ size because it makes me feel at home.” “Grande,” as you probably know, means “big” in Spanish and Italian and at 16 oz. is quite big; but the biggest size, “venti,” is 20 oz. and means “twenty” in Italian.)

The little booklet, however, offered a ray of linguistic light: first came the glossary that defined the various terms – doppio, shaken, Americano, macchiato, etc. It then explained the order in which it was best to say them: what type of cup (must specify for “iced”); what type of coffee (caf or decaf) and/or how many shots of espresso; what size cup; what kind of syrup (maple, hazelnut, vanilla, etc.); what type of artificial sweetener; what type of milk (whole, 2 percent, skim, soy, etc.) and what kind of drink itself – cappuccino, frappuccino, latte, etc. (Italian drink names add that panache that English just can’t match.)

So for one who prefers a simple and relatively inexpensive “tall Earl Grey,” I am always amused by others’ ability to rattle off such word-order-perfect drinks like “an iced, decaf, triple, grande, sugar-free vanilla, soy, 1 Equal, extra-hot mocha,” for roughly 75 cents per adjective.

Word order in general is interesting, because it is so unconscious. For instance, in my first sentence I called Starbucks the “ubiquitous, upscale” coffee chain. Why didn’t I call it the “upscale, ubiquitous” coffee chain? Do I hear, “Because it SOUNDS better?” Yes, but WHY does it sound better? Why does “one, big, red balloon” sound better than “red, big, one balloon?” It’s what your English teacher might have at one time (when they taught grammar) called “syntax.” It’s the set of internal grammatical rules that are rarely taught and mostly just absorbed through listening and speaking a language.

Still, linguists and grammarians have taken some pains to analyze English word order and, though they are not in total agreement, they have come up with some basic structural guidelines. Take adjectives: “One giant, fresh cup of steaming-hot, black, shade-grown South African coffee” is following the rule of “number, size, age, appearance, color, origin, material.”

Outside of places like Starbucks, we normally keep our adjectives limited to three, tops, to describe something: “the fabulous, new, Scorcese movie;” “a sleek, antique, red Jaguar;” “comfortable, worn-out, leather shoes;” these are examples of a general word order placement that goes: opinion, dimension, age, shape, color, origin, material. Sort of like the old Burger King ad: two, all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun.

Now let’s try word order of a different sort. Which (below) sounds better?

a) I take the train every day to work;
b) I take every day the train to work; or
c) I take the train to work every day.

If English is your first language, you probably, unhesitatingly picked c). If you picked b), you’ve got Germanic ancestors calling you; and likewise, if you picked a) you’ve got some Latin blood. Those languages have different word orders from English, which is what adds to the “foreign-ness” sound when we try speaking their languages, or vice-versa.

The subtle choices in those sentences above boil down to Place and Time. Although in English we generally say, “time and place” as an expression, when it comes to word order, we put “Place” over “Time.” That is, “I go to the movies (place) every Wednesday (time).” Try adding more detail, and the order remains: “I go to the movies in the city, down in the Village, at 13th and Broadway, at the Loew’s 4-story multiplex every first Wednesday of the month at 6 p.m.” Place-place-place-place before time, time, time, time, with each phrase getting more and more specific.

Anyone who has studied French, Spanish, or Italian knows soon after cracking open the textbook that adjectives normally go after the noun – as in “sweater red,” instead of our “red sweater.” They also put prepositions like “from” or “at” at the beginning of sentences where we have switched to putting them at the end, if at all: “Where do you come from?” and “What time is the train?” in Spanish come out, “From where do you come?” and “At what time is the train?”

Some of my young, elementary school students who have now been in this country long enough to master English word order have begun to unconsciously occasionally slip in English word order while speaking their native language – much to the amusement, shock, or horror of their parents.

So whether or not you speak proper Starbucksian, you now know basic Starbucksian word order – and probably even some Italian names for coffee drinks. And just knowing that should help you, if you’re ever in doubt, sidle up to the counter, give a venti-sized grin and ask for any big-beige-frothy-artificially sweetened-or-calorie-laden drink you want. Cheers.

English as a Spelling NITEmare

2007-01-21T22:34:00.000-05:00

A response last week from Dan from Los Angeles on the relative difficulty of learning Spanish vs. English:

There's a good case to be made that from the Martian perspective (someone equally unfamiliar with both languages), English is far more irregular and hence harder to learn. Look at our spelling: tough, bough, cough . . . lotion, ocean . . . lazy, daisy . . . Try explaining that to the Spanish.

Thanks for your insights, Dan. And Language Lady agrees with you and your Martians that, on the whole, Spanish is easier to learn as a foreign language than English, due to the regularity of Spanish spelling and pronunciation. The point I wanted to make last week was specifically about English GRAMMAR, and the verb declensions, which were simplified to accommodate all the various cultures living, conquering, or trying to do business in England hundreds of years ago; beyond that, the spelling, pronunciation, numerous verb tenses, and staggering amount of words alone all make me happy that English is my first language.

Dan’s comment (re tough, bough, cough, etc.) reminds me of a little ditty on the idiosyncrasies of English spelling and pronunciation written by an English author, T.S. Wyatt, in 1954 and often found in linguistics textbooks:

RECOVERING SOUNDS FROM ORTHOGRAPHY
BRUSH UP YOUR ENGLISH

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough.
Others may stumble but not you,
On hiccough, though, lough (loch) and through.
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps.

Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird,
And dead--it's said like bed, not bead.
For goodness's sake, don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat:
They rhyme with suite and straight and debt.

A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother,
And here is not a match for there,
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there's dose and rose and lose--
Just look them up--and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword,
And do and go and thwart and cart.
Come, come, I've hardly made a start.

A dreadful language? Man alive,
I'd mastered it when I was five.

Yes, English spelling is a notorious nightmare (though, as Wyatt pointed out, we do seem to learn it fairly quickly) – with most of our everyday words the orthographic results of some loose decisions made some 600 years ago. It started with a hodge-podge of West Saxon spellings and pronunciations; then post-Norman Conquest medieval monks changed certain spellings to look more like the new prestige language, Anglo-Norman French: for example, “cwen” became “queen;” then, around the 1400s people started pronouncing words differently: “great,” which was originally said, “gray-aht” became “great” as we know it, while “bread” changed from the Old English “bray-at” to Middle English “breed” and then to our current short-e’d “bread.” And those nasty “gh” spellings were trying to convey the gutteral Germanic “ch” sound, as in “Achtung!” But trying to understand the reasons for all English’s spelling conundrums doesn’t make it easier. We just have to accept that English spelling is what happens when conquest happens and no one is really in charge …

George Bernard Shaw, the famous English playwright, once wrote a plea for spelling reform by demonstrating that the way our language stood now, you could spell “fish” as “ghoti:”

“gh” as in “rough”
“o” as in “women”
“ti” as in “nation.”

Spelling reform has been tried at various times, but it just doesn’t work – at this point, there are too many English speakers with different accents and pronunciations. What if they standardized a phonetic spelling so we all pronounced words like Texans? And do you think the British could stand a phonetic alphabet that sounded like standard American? Or vice versa? It’s one thing for American spelling to remove the “u” in the British “honour;” another thing all together to try to force the Brits to say “On-er” instead of “on-ah.”

Which is not to say we won’t ever see any simplification -- advertising and commerce will see to that. The main spelling shifts I’ve seen in my lifetime have come about through just such routes. Take: donut, lite, nite. Triboro and thru. I credit Dunkin’ Donuts (born in the 1950s, part of mass culture by the 1970s) with the popularization of “donut” from the original “doughnut” – a variant sanctioned by the dictionary for over 25 years. “Nite” and “lite” are also listed in the dictionary as informal, simplified spellings of “night” and “light;” even so, the dictionary only recognizes “nite” as a noun -- as in TV’s “Nick at Nite” -- and not as an adjective -- as in Nite Lite, though there are now dozens of products, company names, catalogues, and TV shows with the name, “Nite Lite.” Meanwhile, the dictionary specifies that “lite” is mainly used in advertising to describe something with less substance or fewer calories – as in lite music and lite beer.

The words, “Triboro” and “thru” are also now commonplace, informal substitutes for “Triborough” (as in the bridge spanning three boroughs of New York City) and “through.” “Boro” is not in the dictionary but it may be soon: as part of a name, “boro” can be found in a bike tour group, a bar and grill, a bookstore, and so on; but “borough” is still the more standard --nor are we close to being thru with “through.” Still, perhaps with the speed that technology changes things, it will not be too many years from now that all “gh” words will be obsolete, and the variant forms the new standard ones. Perhaps in the future linguists will refer to the early 21st century as a period of The Great Silent GH Exodus.

For now, the word to watch is “you” (and “yours” and “your”): as text messaging and email are on their way to making this Y-O-U spelling look archaic to anyone under the age of 25; we can start watching to see when the dictionary accepts this second person pronoun’s variant -- the simple, lowercase “u”.

So keep ur eyes peeled! And good nite.

“Why Can’t Spanish Be More Like English?”

2007-01-14T22:21:00.001-05:00

It was Sunday night, that notorious time when a student realizes that certain homework requirements have not been met. Thus, my disgruntled teenager, Nick, plopped himself down on the couch so I could quiz him on the Spanish past tense verbs. At that moment, Nick was pretty much “disgusted” (his word) with the whole language: “There’s like 25 ways to say one word,” he complained. Spanish verb forms, like the Latin ones they grew from, give each “person” (I, you, he, etc.) a different ending. English, on the other hand, simplified the whole thing long ago.

Compare:
To Speak (past tense)
I spoke
You spoke
He/she/it spoke
We spoke
They spoke

Not bad! As long as a person remembers that the past tense is “spoke” and not, say, “speaked,” getting it right is a sure thing. In Spanish, it’s a different case:

Hablar (To Speak, past tense)
(I) Yo hable
(You – familiar) Tu hablaste
(You – formal) Usted hablo
(He/she – there is no “it”) El/ella hablo
(We) Nosotros hablamos
(You, familiar & plural) Vosotros hablasteis
(You, formal & plural) Ustedes hablaron
(They, masculine & feminine) Ellos/ellas hablaron
Even if your eyes just skim over that last part, it’s clear at a glance that English takes home the Simplicity Prize.

Not that this simplicity came overnight: it took every bit of 300 years, and then some, to change the mind-boggling complexities of Old English grammar into the comparatively streamlined Modern English grammar. Old English was a West Germanic dialect spoken from roughly 400-1100 A.D. and had all the personal pronouns that Spanish still has, masculine and feminine nouns, and – most difficult of all -- five fully inflected grammatical cases; (if you don’t know what that means, you probably don’t want to know, at least right now.)

Suffice it to say, without the benefit of Old English as Second Language lessons, it was a hard language for foreigners to master. And for a good long while, England was a veritable polyglot nation. Norman French (native tongue of William the Conqueror, who sailed from Normandy, France and conquered England in 1066) was the language of the nobility, government and literature, and later science and commerce; meanwhile, Latin was the language of the Church. At the same time, there were parts of England where commoners still spoke the Danish or Norwegian from their Viking forbears. And each of the 25 English counties, from Berkshire to Yorkshire, had its own local Old English dialect as well.

All this multiculturalism took a toll on good ol’ Old English and got what I call the big Linguistic Shakedown. Basically, people crossing boundaries and language borders to raid, trade, marry or otherwise communicate started speaking the most basic English in order to be understood. Sort of like tourists do when they go to another country and can’t speak the local language. In time, the simplifications simply became standard. Just one “you”; no more case endings, no more adjectives that have to modify their nouns, and really easy declensions (I do, you do, etc), and adding “s” to make nouns plural – though some Old English irregular plurals have hung on – like men, women and children.

Of course, understanding why English grammar is comparatively easy compared to Spanish does not do Nick any good. Even if I tell him that Spanish is a dialect of Latin and took out some of the harder parts of that Mother Tongue, he is not going to feel any better. Spanish never got the Linguistic Shakedown that English did because it was adopted by the King of Castile, in Spain, and then established as the principal language of government and trade; later, explorers and conquistadors took Spanish overseas – to Latin America and other places, without any problem. It’s now one of the most widely spoken (close to 400 million native speakers worldwide) and widely studied languages in the world.

So … statistically, the chances that Nick will eventually master those past tense verbs are pretty good. But for now, Nick sees little future with the past.

Auld Lang … Hogmanay?

2007-01-01T21:46:00.000-05:00

“Hog-ma-nay?”
“How do you spell that?”
“What is it again?”
“Hogmanay. H-O-G-M-A-N-A-Y.”

This past Friday, December 29, was my sister’s birthday and I had driven up to her home in the wireless wilds of the northwest woods of Massachusetts to celebrate with her, her family, and assorted friends. As a way of extending the evening into what became the early morning, we played “Dictionary,” the game in which one person searches the dictionary for a word that no one else knows; while everyone else writes their own anonymous definitions for the word on separate pieces of paper, the word selector writes the real meaning on his own; then the word selector collects and reads aloud all definitions, sneaking in the official one too. People then vote on the definition most likely to be the word’s real meaning. That evening, the randomly chosen – and amazingly fitting -- word was “Hogmanay.”

None of us supposedly well-traveled, well-educated individuals had ever heard of this weird word, which was spelled with a capital H. It naturally lent itself to such porcine-associated definitions as:

“Asking a pig for permission (see: hog/may);

*A large swine-breeding facility;

*The relationship between man and hog; farmed pigs.

Others thought the hog relationship was perhaps a little too obvious and went other, more random meanings:

*A threatening declaration as a result of an irrational, negative emotion;

*A large purple sweater, loosely knit; orig: Kenya;

*The debris that falls out from between the treads of shoes or boots.

In trying to guess the real definition, no one gave the slightest consideration to the seemingly random: “The eve of New Year’s Day. Scottish. Origin: obscure.” All the other definitions seemed to hint at some truth or other, but not that one.

And yet that was exactly the definition given by my sister’s 40-year-old Miriam- Webster’s dictionary. We laughed off the Scots’ odd name for “New Year’s Eve” and went to bed.

Meanwhile, little did we know that on that same evening over in Scotland the thousand-year-old, originally pagan Hogmanay celebration was already under way: in Edinburgh, the annual torchlight parade had kicked off the three-day event with a horde of men dressed as Vikings and carrying torches through the town, while a crowd of some 15,000 strong from Scotland and all over the world followed behind to see the ceremonial burning of the Viking long-boat on the top of the city’s Calton Hill.

Wikipedia’s suggested etymology of Hogmanay (pronounced Hug-M’nay, according to a friend’s Scottish husband) may have come from Old French(via the Normans who settled in England in the 11th century who trickled up to Scotland, perhaps?), from the phrase, “au gui mener,” meaning “to lead to the mistletoe.” (Well, it’s possible, considering the pagan reverence for the evergreen plant that they believed held health and fertility powers.) Wikipedia also said that
Hogmanay could be from Scottish Gaelic for “Og Mhadaninn,” meaning, “new morning.”

One of the main customs of Hogmanay is for children to go from house to house asking for presents; it is also traditional for adult Scots to go visiting from house to house (without asking for presents). Some Scottish-American friends of ours keep up the Hogmanay “foot first,” luck-bringing tradition that requires a (preferably) dark-haired (blond-haired would imply Viking – enemy – descent) and (preferably) tall and handsome man (yes, only men -- go ahead and boo, ladies) to be the first person over the threshold each New Year’s Day, and for the man (or teenager or little boy) to bring with him something to eat, something to drink, and some fuel -- traditionally, a lump of coal.

The http://www.hogmanay.net/ site lists all the goings-on in Edinburgh over the New Year holiday: concerts, a “Night Afore” party, revels, fireworks, runs, a bike triathlon, and even a “dogmanay” – a dog sled race with Alaskan huskies. And there are the fires -- big-big bonfires – originally to ward off those evil spirits that started haunting the pagans back around Halloween. So, together with bonfires and fireworks, imagine helmeted Vikings and long torchlights; bagpipers, drummers, fireworks, effigies … THAT is Hogmanay! And up until about twenty years ago in Scotland this event outranked Christmas, which was still a regular working day even in the 1970s. Nowadays, Christmas and Hogmanay are both national holidays, though Hogmanay no doubt draws in more tourists.

My question is, why didn’t Hogmanay make it to the United States? Why, given the amount of Americans with Scottish ancestry, is this word and festival so little known? If the Scottish could bring us plaid skirts and bagpipe parades, why not Homanay? To me, the only off-putting part of it is the sound of the word – so awkward and giving no clue to its real meaning; but could that have been enough to keep the Scots from transplanting this tradition when they started coming to America some two hundred years ago? (Their arrival began before Christmas was firmly established here.) Perhaps if the holiday had had a better name or marketing campaign, we’d be saying, “Happy Hogmanay” today.

Still, if the United States has lost out on Hogmanay – and perhaps small towns and cities are better off without the Viking hordes and torches setting fire to longboats on the edges of town – at least we have one other Scottish New Year’s tradition to salute: “Auld Lang Syne.”

This 18th century Scottish song is heard, played and sung (sometimes drunkenly) at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve all across the U.S. – on TV, at fancy balls, at family firesides. Credit for this American New Year’s anthem -- as unifying a force as noisemakers and confetti – must first go to Scotland’s Robert Burns (1759-1796), who breathed new life into the otherwise dead and buried words and tune, written anonymously long before; more recent credit must go as well as to the Canadian bandleader, Guy Lombardo (1902-1977), whose rendition of this song marked midnight on New Years Eve, first on American radio and later on TV, from roughly 1930-1970. By now, it’s the song that everyone sort of mumbles along to until getting to the words, “auld lang syne.”

Perhaps the song has survived because the tune is slow, you can drape your arm around friend or stranger for one brief, bonding moment while you sing; and no matter how much champagne you’ve had, few will notice if you skip or hum the words, because so few people know them all anyway.

Here, for the record, are the words – so you can resolve (and no doubt break the resolution) to learn them for next year’s celebration … Although Americans are happy enough to get through the first verse and chorus, this being a language column, I’ve given you the song in its old Scots entirety – with my own rough translations – thanks to Hogmanay.net

Auld Lang Syne (resurrected from an old Scottish poem and traditional melody) by Robert (aka Rabbie) Burns, 1759-1796
Should auld acquaintance be forgot, And never brought to mind? Should auld acquaintance be forgot, And days of auld lang syne?
(Should old friends be forgotten and never thought of? Should old friends be forgotten and days (literally: “of old long since.”)
CHORUS: For auld lang syne, my dear, For auld lang syne, We'll tak a cup of kindness yet, For auld lang syne!
(For old times gone, my ear; for old time’s gone, we’ll drink a cup of ale, for (approx) old times gone.)
And surely ye'll be your pint-stowp, And surely I'll be mine, And we'll tak a cup o kindness yet, For auld lang syne!
(And surely you’ll pay for your tankard of ale, and surely I’ll pay for mine; and we’ll take a cup of kindness/ale, for old times gone.)
We twa hae run about the braes, And pou'd the gowans fine, But we've wander'd monie a weary fit, Sin auld lang syne.
(We two have run about the hills, and pulled the daisies fine; but we’ve wandered many a weary foot, since the days so long ago.)
We twa hae paidl'd in the burn Frae morning sun till dine, But seas between us braid hae roar'd Sin auld lang syne.
(We two have paddled in the stream from noon til dinner, but seas between us wide have roared since days of long ago.)
And there's a hand my trusty fiere, And gie's a hand o thine, And we'll tak a right guid-willie waught, For auld lang syne
(And there’s a hand my trusty friend, and you give your hand to me;
And we’ll take a right good drink … for old times gone.)

And from the Westchester highlands of Larchmont, the Language Lady wishes you all “a right-good willie-waught” (“waught” a great expression!) and a cup o’ kindness in any form, for 2007!

Before You Can Say, “Bah Humbug!”

2006-12-24T16:33:00.001-05:00

Feeling shopped-out?

I’m surprised to find that “shopped-out” is not included in the dictionary, even though we all know exactly what it means: the sensation (or actual state) of having completely and thoroughly (the redundancy is necessary for emphasis) exhausted oneself and one’s wallet in shopping for multiple gifts for multiple people for a certain occasion.

How do you know when you’re “shopped-out?” I compare it to the moment at a feast or big dinner when you realize you absolutely cannot take another bite. You know you’re shopped-out when the thought of buying one more thing – another mug, picture frame or tube of hand lotion -- becomes a mere physical impossibility; like an injured racehorse at the starting gate, you simply cannot enter another store or stand in another line (or “on” another line, if you’re from New York) or open your wallet for anyone but, ahem, yourself. (By that time, a grande eggnog soy latte might hit the spot.)

The key is to stop shopping before the words, “Bah humbug!” start tripping from your lips. Now, anyone who grew up with “Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol” knows full well that “Bah humbug” comes from Charles Dickens’s immortal Ebenezer Scrooge, the miser transformed by the Christmas spirits Past, Present and Future in his book, A Christmas Carol. That book, so memorably transformed to a TV cartoon special in the 1960s, is one of the three literary mainstays of the Christmas season, the other two being the Nativity story itself, and then “The Night Before Christmas,” the 1822 poem that gave us flying reindeer, a chimney-hopping St. Nicholas, and stockings for Santa to fill.

But Scrooge himself has made such an impression on English and American culture that his name is now used as a proper or common noun, and is defined in the dictionary as a person who is miserly and mean, just as Dickens created him.
Dickens, however, was a little more descriptive than my American Heritage, and if you haven’t read A Christmas Carol lately, it’s worth reading his description:

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his think lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice.

Such an amazing collection of words and images! Granted, I think Dickens got paid by the word, but he chose words that have transcended time and entered our culture. Will our new words, like website or panini or barista do the same?

And how to describe today’s corporate, money-grubbing bigwigs. Invisible, for the most part – unless they’ve gotten caught for some felony or other. But what bothers me most about these invisible heads of food and service corporations is the language they force into the mouths of their service people working the counters on the frontlines:

No longer is it simply enough for a customer to make a purchase or order something to eat or drink. The clerks and baristas are now supposed to ask, oh so gently but firmly, if you wouldn’t like to buy something ELSE.

Take the cafes at Barnes & Noble, for instance; this is not one Barnes & Noble Café, but all over. If you ask for a small tea, which comes to about $2 and is at least 10 times the cost of the bag, water and cup it’s served in, it still gives a patron the right to sit and enjoy the moment at a table while reading any amount of unpaid- for items. Considering all that, a $2 tea is quite a bargain. What I can’t stand, however (and at the risk of sounding like Andy Rooney) are the questions that follow the simple order:

 Would you like to try our new, larger size cup for just 20 cents extra?
 Would you like a biscotti with that?
 Would you like a panini with that?
 Are you a Barnes & Noble Club member (for a cost of $25)?

This offensive type of language is something so pervasive in our culture that I have coined it, “Hucksterish,” a huckster being a particularly aggressive sales person. Modern Hucketerish seems to have started with the “Some fries with that?” automatic question at McDonald’s – a question that often even followed orders including fries. Similar questions abound at the Gap, Pier One, and Abercrombie & Fitch and practically every other type of store, save the grocery store. (Also, Starbucks seems to be above this language, though their non-verbal tip jars apparently bother some.)

While shopping at Pier One the other day, I was in line next to a woman purchasing a sofa for the sale price of $1,047 including tax and delivery fee. Not bad for a couch but still no small sum. And yet what did the young, personable sales woman have to say: “Would you like some throw pillows to go with that?”

A friend of mine’s daughter works at the preppy porn palace of Abercrombie & Fitch and is required to ask all holiday shoppers as they walk in, “Have you seen our sexy new fleece?”

It’s all simply ” fries with that?”

Perhaps that is the American way, along with Santa and Superman, but it’s as offensive and brazen as anything P. Diddy ever rapped. If I asked for tea but neglected to ask for a $7 panini because I “forgot,” then let me go hungry. The poor Hucksterish-speaking barista will not benefit either way – the profits simply go into the mill, and the server keeps earning minimum wage. Bah humbug!

So who are these scrooges who force this verbiage upon us unarmed consumers? We read articles about what “sophisticated” and “savvy” shoppers we have become, but that’s a small order of fries compared to the people selling them to us. And yet these Masters in Command are nowhere to be seen to the average customer. Sure, I can visit the website, but where on Barnes & Noble’s, can I complain about The Four Questions? Who invented the line, “sexy new fleece” and forced it into the mouth of a young and hard-working sales clerk? And why didn’t the Pier One sales woman simply throw in some throw pillows as a courtesy? Now, that’s the spirit of Christmas!

It’s never too late to change, as Scrooge himself discovered:

(Scrooge) became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them … His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.

So perhaps it’s a good thing to feel shopped-out: All you can do then is to stop, relax, enjoy! Make some pumpkin bread for yourself and family, sit down for a moment and pick up a book, not a catalogue; or finish wrapping presents with a little “White Christmas.” Do anything that’s corny, sentimental and full of love and laughter – and kiss “bah humbug” goodbye.

Gifts You Never Knew You Wanted

2006-12-17T23:35:00.000-05:00

Our house is now certainly decked* out for Christmas, from the kitschy* to the elegant* (I can hear some of you readers* who know us adding, “But mostly kitsch.”) No matter what, the effect is warm and cheery* and I hope the season so far is a happy one for you all.

Now, this week’s “gift” (i.e. posting) includes bringing alive some of the fairly ordinary words that I have asterixed above -- (yes, “asterix” – Latin for “star” -- is also a verb, according to the computer’s dictionary). Those starred words span more than 1,000 years of history. And if you read to the end to the end of the blog, you’ll find another unique holiday gift – this one a rare translation of the chorus to a well-known American seasonal song into a Western European dialect so regional that it has no official written language.

Whether you’re as excited as children checking their stockings, or feeling like Aunt Margaret just delivered her annual box of dried prunes and fruitcake, here are this week’s offerings:

* Deck – from the 15th century Middle English word, “to cover.” Today, the German word for “blanket” is “Decke.” I always thought that “deck” was some anglicized variation of “decorate,” which comes from the Latin word for “ornament.” Even though both words go back to the Indo-European root, “dek” you can see that they both went their separate ways.

* Kitschy – From the 20th century Germanic word, “kitschen” meaning “to throw together sloppily;” and no -- “kitsch” and “kitchen” are not linguistically related: “Kitchen” is a variant of the Latin “coquere,” meaning, “to cook” -- though in my case the dual connection might apply. Anyway, “kitschy” itself grew out of the word “kitsch,” which sprang into use in Germany in the 1860’s –70s, when the newly moneyed middle class started trying to show off their status by buying art work – with the market supplying all kinds of cheap imitation art, meant to convey affluence and good taste, but in fact, did the opposite. By the 1930’s, however, “kitsch” was so popular that art theorist Theodor Odomo called kitsch a “threat to culture.” Today, for many, kitsch just implies retro, or ironic humor.

* Elegant – This comes from the 15th century Middle English, by way of Middle French, by way of the Latin, “elegere” for “elect,” or “select,” with the “ant” part just being an adjective ending. Since the words “deck” and “elegant” originated at about the same time, it seems likely that they needed elegant to describe the decking, which was apparently not “kitschy,” which, as stated above, is a relatively new word. (Though I imagine bad taste existed before the 20th century, it seems to have taken an extra 500 years to come up with a precise word for it. Now that’s progress!)

* Readers – Wo! It’s now time for a trip in the “Way-Back Machine” (remember Mr. Peabody and Sherman?) Our word “read” dates back to before 900, when the middle vowels were reversed in “raeden,” meaning “to counsel, advise or explain.” In German today “reden” still means “to advise,” but their word for “to read” is “lesen,” (lay-zen); in fact, all the other Western European languages – except English -- eventually turned to Latin derivatives for their words for “read” and “write:” (Swedish: lasa, skriva ; French: lire, ecrire; Spanish: leer, escribir)
Our word “write” goes back to Old English for “to tear or scratch,” which does for the current definition what “kitschen” does for “kitchen.”

* Cheery – How cute: “cheery” comes to us from 12th century Middle English by way of Old French, “chiere,” which is from the street Latin word “cara” meaning, “face.” There are some synonyms for “cheer” -- joy, mirth, merriment, gladness, and glee – words we all know but are more special occasion words; whereas cheer, as well as cheery and cheer up, are all-year-round sorts of nouns, verbs and adjectives, which is nice because just saying those words makes me smile.

And speaking of smiling, I now give you the words to “Jingle Bells” in Swiss German -- a dialect of German that Germans themselves cannot understand. Swiss German has simplified and scaled down standard German – to the point where there’s not even a past tense! (They use the present tense, and context, to distinguish.) The language is spoken locally, among all social strata, but not spoken in school, where it is all German. Still, Swiss German is the “linguistic home” to about 4 million people. So should you ever venture to the environs of Zurich, you will perhaps be praised to Matterhorn heights with this rendition – well known even in English over there -- of this 1857 classic, here written down and translated by 11-year-old Dominik from near the Alpine city of St. Gallen:

JINGLE BELLS (in Swiss German)

Jingle bells, jingle bells, alli stigat i! (Pron: all-ee stee-goat ee)
(Everyone gets in!)

Hut gots uf a schlittafahrt und alli si da bi! (Pron: hoot goats ooff oh shlittah-fart,
oond all-ee see da-bee)
(Here we go on a sleigh ride and everyone is there)

Jingle bells, jingle bells, gal du nimsch oos mit; (Pron: guel doo nimsh oos mit)
(Be sure to take us with you)

So na wildi schlittafahrt isch schonsti wo es git! (Pron: so no vil-dee shlittah-fart ish shoon-stee vo es git!)
(Such a wild sleigh ride is the greatest thing there is!)

Catchy – without being kitschy – isn’t it?! I hope this leaves you feeling cheery, dear readers, while you continue to deck your elegant halls and otherwise enjoy the season.

A Merry Little Yuletide, Now (Presently)

2006-12-10T23:34:00.000-05:00

Despite a globally warmish December air in New York, it’s still very much the Christmas season, with Christmas songs playing as a backdrop to our days and gift-shopping quests. Those songs have a way of connecting one year to the next and most of them are as familiar as old friends. And yet within the familiar words and tunes, language change is all over the place.

Take the song lodged in my head right now: it’s the Judy Garland/Frank Sinatra/James Taylor/Alvin and the Chipmunks (they all sang it) favorite, “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas;” there is a line in that song that says “Make the yuletide gay”: now, most of us can guess from context that “Yule” (heard in other songs) means Christmas, and then extrapolate that “yuletide” probably means Christmas time -- but where do those words come from? And why do we sing them?

In fact, Yule is the old Germanic name for the winter solstice celebration, a big bonfire-oriented festival that traditionally fell on the December solstice. In those pagan days, and in those northern European climes, the cold, snowy land looked fairly bleak and days were short and dark. By December 21, the shortest day of the year, the theme of those solstice parties was “light” – as in Bring It Back. Building bonfires and dancing around them was no doubt a big morale booster for those worried that the sun was dying; other bright or light-themed decorations and festivities were a major feature – then as now.

Even the word for our color, “yellow,” or Old English “geolu” (give the “g” a “y” sound) is rooted in the ancient word for “bright.” And the Anglo-Saxons’ word for the month of December was “geola.”

Although “Yule” predated Christianity in northern Europe, once the people were converted, Yule came to be another word for Christmas. Even today, Scandinavians wish each other “God Jul” (Good Yule) “Tide” is the Germanic word for “time,” with “yuletide” traditionally stretching from December 24-January 6.

As for making the yuletide “gay,” well, it’s clear in 2006 that that word has also undergone some meaningful change since the song was written in 1944, when the word still meant "happy." Even then, though, in some circles, “gay,” had an extended meaning of “carefree – including "living outside the norm.” For a while, straight men who were bachelors could be considered “gay,” if their lives were unconventional enough, as in the Fred Astaire movie, "The Gay Divorcee." But by the late 1960s the word had come to mean being homosexual or lesbian. Still, James Taylor, in his 2001 version of "Have Yourself", sings the word the way it was originally intended and it sounds just right. Sometimes, context is everything.

Speaking of word change, this week’s posting includes a question from a Language Lady reader, who asks:

Q. Can you teach me the difference between "presently" and "currently”? I avoid these words because I'm confused.
-- Bev, from Virginia

A. No wonder you’re confused, Bev: “Presently” means both “now” and “later.” You’ve caught a word that seems to be in transition from one meaning to another. It usually takes decades or longer for a word to fully realize the change, so we are not used to noticing the changes going on in our own lifetime. However unwittingly, you have found one! In the Encarta World English Dictionary, the first meaning of “presently” is “in a short while;” the second meaning is “now,” with synonyms listed as “at the moment,” “at present,” and – last but not least – “currently.”

It is the second meaning of “presently” – as “now,” or “currently” – that is the Definition Upstart. In my 1978 American Heritage Dictionary, the Usage Panel said that although the word was increasingly used that way, it was acceptable to only 47% of the Usage Panel. Twenty years later, my Oxford Essential English Dictionary says that both meanings – “soon” as well as “now” are widely used.

But if you ask me, “presently” meaning “now” – as in, “We are presently undergoing technical difficulties,” is the more popular understanding of the word; however, “presently” is not the kind of word we say when speaking. For example, we would never think to say, in answer to a question, “Oh, he’s presently out of the office.” Even if that were a written response, it would be on the formal and stilted side. But using “presently” to mean “shortly” sounds even more stilted -- to my ears like nature shows with some English (British) narrator speaking in low tones: “And presently we’ll see the hungry python devour the curious rat …”

Nonetheless, saying, “We are presently not accepting any more applications” is absolutely correct and clear, and fine for form-letter types of writing. However, I prefer the word, “currently” – as much for the acoustic strength of the “hard-C” as for the lack of confusion; as in, “We are not currently accepting …” Plug in “now” and you get: “We are not now accepting …” which is all right but sounds a bit hard – “now” is just too short, and not fluid enough for my taste in that context; still, it is certainly clear and concise. The only thing you should not do is substitute any of the “now” synonyms for “at the present time,” or “at this point in time,” those being way too wordy and bland.

In today’s New York Times Magazine William Safire discusses the transition of the words “rear” and “raise”: It used to be, he said, that people “reared” their children and “raised” their crops, and for years he used to politely correct friends who mentioned “raising kids.” But in today’s article, Safire conceded that the word for bringing up one’s children was now – as baby boomer and younger parents can attest from personal experience and usage -- definitely “raise.”

So you could say: In 1966, “raising children” would only PRESENTLY be the standard way to express “bringing up children;” whereas in 2006 “raising children” is PRESENTLY, or CURRENTLY, the only way to say it.

Well, presently, the presents will be presented; the Yule will be celebrated and we’ll once more recite “The Night Before Christmas” and still not really know what, exactly “visions of sugar plums” look like – but that’s okay. You can still have yourself a merry little yuletide, presently.

An “I” for an “I” (and Thanks, Liz from Maryland)

2006-12-03T23:29:00.000-05:00

Please consider the following recent quotations by two enormously successful men who have made their fortunes dealing with words, either their own or others’:

“I and senior management agree with the American public that this was an ill-considered project.”

- So said internationally renowned multimedia news and publishing mogul Rupert Murdoch, upon canceling a book that would have given us O.J. SImpson’s ghostwritten account of the infamous murder he was acquitted of ten years ago.

And:

“I was 12 … when I and two sisters were assembled for an hour of ’music appreciation’.”

- This is from today’s New York Times Book Review, in a review by the outspoken, conservative columnist, editor, author, etc., William F. Buckley, who is as famous for his strong opinions and biting intellect as for his command of the English language; in his review of “Johann Sebastian Bach: Life and Work” by Martin Geck.

Both Tabloid King and Renaissance Conservative broke a grammar rule so basic, so elementary, my dear Watson, so entrenched in English and other languages as to be difficult to find the rule for -- but here it is: “In a series of two (or more) subjects or objects, the pronoun, “I” (LL adds: or object pronoun, “me”) comes last, for the sake of politeness.” This is from “Modern English: A Practical Reference Guide,” by Marcella Frank,1972, a grammar guide I bought secondhand right out of college: It’s not cute, witty or fun like so many guides today, but it dishes the stuff straight.

Of course, teenagers love to break this “others first” rule by saying, “Me and her are going to town,” and other dialectical variations; but Rupert and Bill are senior statesmen of words and media and grew up in the days when students were thoroughly schooled in grammar – especially these two students who, respectively, went on to Oxford and Yale universities.

When I mentioned Mr. Murdoch’s grammar gaff to a newspaper editor, he replied glibly (granted, it was on the early morning train) that the CEO of Fox News was so rich and powerful, he could say whatever he liked. Well, Mike Tyson was once rich and powerful but that didn’t mean he could bite off Evander Holyfield’s ear without repercussions.

The question is why these two astute, worldly and word-wise men both broke normal phrasing and basic grammatical etiquette to put themselves first. In Mr. Murdoch’s case, why couldn’t he have started off: “Senior management and I …” Was he thinking, “I should be the first to blame for initially greenlighting O.J.’s book, not senior management …” or was he just putting himself first because he’s so rich and powerful?

As for Mr. Buckley – shame on him! For a wordsmith of his caliber, “I and two sisters” should have triggered a Klieg-sized light in his head. I cannot imagine why “my sisters and I” did not slip unhesitatingly off his tongue. And who was the Times editor that let that one slip past?

Let’s hope these two titans are not sparking a trend in “I” speak. Think how different the world would be with the musical, “I and the King;” or a Downeast humor duo called, “I and Bert;” or Linda Ronstadt singing, “I and you travel to the beat of a different drum.” You get the picture.

I can accept language change in general, but in this case, well, what’s the harm in holding onto a little verbal nicety in putting others first – senior management and sisters included -- and ourselves last. At least, so think I.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Thanks, Liz from Maryland!

A Christmas-colored package arrived in the mail yesterday, addressed to the Language Lady, and with the explicit instructions to open ASAP and not wait until Christmas. Inside was a paperback titled, “Woe Is I: The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English,” by Patricia T. O’Conner, the revised edition, 2003. So thoughtful, Liz! Thank you!! Being at home with a nasty cold, I got back into bed, fluffed up the pillows and proceeded to read this fun, funny, clever, helpful, and bestselling book that any of you faithful readers would also enjoy – or at least might want handy when The Language Lady is not clear enough for you. Patricia T. O’ Conner has apparently written loads of successful language books that are out on the market, some co-written with her husband, Stewart Kellerman, who, a zillion years ago when we both worked at United Press International, was the first to teach me the difference between “which” and “that.”

Guest Blogger: Smoke Gets in Your Brain

2006-12-03T23:25:00.000-05:00

The Language Lady would like to present her first guest blogger, a transplanted New Yorker now living in the warm but smoggy Southern California coast, and writing under the name, “Gunish Helfen.” (Anyone know what her name means?)

Letter from Los Angeles:
Smoke Gets in Your Brain

One of the more startling aspects of living in Los Angeles for a New Yorker like me is the manner in which Los Angelenos choose their words. Being vague, it turns out, is not only essential for social interaction but something which, if you do not do, results in punishment in the form of social ostracization. That is, if you speak properly, people will, after looking at you weirdly, avoid you.

There is, of course, the over- and incorrect usage of “like,” used repeatedly in one sentence as in, “Like, we have, like a low-fat blueberry muffin or like an apple-cinnamon, like, fat one.” This has been written about many times before and has become quite ordinary usage for nearly everyone. But, out here, we like to add the word “umm” to “like,” as in “I’m going to, umm, like, get a green tea frappucino.” It is of particular note that “umm” is not a sign of hesitation on the speaker’s part or a bleep the speaker uses to create time in order to decide what he or she will be ordering. It’s more like an announcement to others to pay attention, similar to the Principal clearing his or her throat at a student assembly. When the speaker adds “you know,” well, then you have almost the full L.A. narcissistic experience in one sentence. As in, “Like, you know, you take the, umm, 10 East to LaBrea.” What the speaker means is, “Oh, it’s so boring that you have to take the freeway rather than using that time to listen to me. So I will take ten minutes to say what can be said in two.”

Almost. For we cannot forget “totally,” as in “I totally thought it was a banana muffin.” Unlike “like” or “umm,” totally is actually a meaningful word, which makes its usage more brain-addling than the others. How can one “totally” think something? Certainly, one can have an idea ingrained in one’s mind and then be mistaken. One can be consumed or obsessed, even when facts tell you differently. But to totally think something? It would be more proper, if, umm, awkward, to say, “I thought with all that thoughts’ totality that it was a banana muffin,” but then it would take even longer to get your muffin and get on the freeway.

Language is a tool of thought. When it is made imprecise, bland, repetitive, well, I find it disappointing at best and infuriating at worse. Then it takes even more effort to repress the thought of putting the offending speaker’s hand into the iced blended blender. That I could even think like that like, totally, umm, makes me want like a, umm, Cantaloupe Frozen. Totally.

Signed,
Gunish Helfen (That’s Yiddish for “Nothing Helps.”)

In the Know

2006-11-25T23:05:00.000-05:00

A French student of mine, a banker but philosopher at heart, recently asked what the “k” and “w” were doing on either end of the word, “know.” C’est un bon question, I replied, stalling for time, though realizing fairly instantly, and admitting: I did not KNOW.

I followed up by asking him why French had two words for “know” – one (connaitre) for being acquainted with people and places, and another one (savoir) for facts, general ideas and basic experience. His reply was similar to mine, in that he didn’t know; but then, with a Gallic shrug, he added (supply your own French accent here) that maybe two words for “know” are necessary -- but maybe they are just tradition.

Hmm: necessary, or tradition -- Which is it? Perhaps not as thought-provoking as Clairol’s old ads, “Does she or doesn’t she? or “Is it true blondes have more fun?” but I decided to look into the whole “know” question anyway.

One thought I’ve come to is that there may have been a time when Old English, say, 1,500 years ago, also had two words for “know”; but back then the language also had genders and case endings for nouns, two forms for “you” and other complexities. English eventually (and thankfully!) shed those and other features and so, if there ever were two “knows,” we have gotten along just fine with our one “know” for literally ages:

“Do you know the way to San Jose?”
“Hey, whaddya know?!”
“Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye”
“What did he know and when did he know it?”
“It’s not what you know; it’s who you know.”

How easy with the one-word-fits-all kind of thing (except for in the biblical sense, which is now considered archaic). And not one of my foreign students has ever complained about the paucity of “knows” in English.

Oddly enough, many widely spoken languages agree with the French that two “knows” are better (or necessary, or tradition) than one. To see this globally, grab a map and color in all of Western Europe, Russia, China, Japan, South and Central America and any former French, Dutch or Portuguese colonies in Africa and elsewhere. (I admit, I’m not accounting for India’s languages, but that’s too confusing.) Still, at the very least the number of “two know” language speakers comes to more than 2 billion people, versus the clearly out-numbered half billion English speakers using one. So, in the spirit of, “50,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong?” should we reconsider?

The sheer diversity and quantity of “two-know” speakers are what make me think that perhaps English used to have two “knows,” just as we once used two words for “you”: “you” for the formal, and “thou” (like “tu” in Spanish and French, and “du” in German) for the informal, as in, “But thou O Lord, have mercy upon us,” (from the King James Bible – which, I agree sound anything but informal). In any case, whatever English lost in dropping “thou” -- perhaps a touch of linguistic intimacy – we have gained as a culture by the simple, democratic nature of “you” and in not having to worry about offending an elder or recent acquaintance. But I digress: with a second “know,” I can’t think of anything that might have been lost.

One difference might be in introductions: The Frank Sinatra song, “Have You Met Miss Jones?” might be otherwise translated as, “Do You Know Miss Jones?” (Perhaps that lingering archaic biblical reference is another reason we phrase introductions the way we do.) Then there’s the phrase, “It’s not what you know, it’s who* you know:” Okay, it’s a cliché, but at least it’s got some symmetry. The French, on the other hand, must say, “Ce n’est pas ce qu’on sait, mais qui on connait,” which means, “It is not what one knows but whom one is acquainted with,” which completely loses the What-You-Know-Who-You-Know rhythm, and the phrase simply becomes a truism. (*Grammar hounds: let’s not choose this place to quibble over “who” vs. “whom,” okay? But I’m happy you spotted that.)

To find out why “know” is spelled with a silent “k” and “w” required a little search in the dictionary (I like the Random House American Heritage one):
The word began with the Indo-European root (and these roots are about 8,000 years old), “gno,” which meant “to know.” The early Germans (a barbarian people we call the Saxons) took that word and stretched it out a bit to “gnow” and later … to the word (and pronouncing the “k”) “know.” The Saxon tribes brought this word from northern Europe to the post-Roman Britain (450 A.D.), and there the word merged unchanged into Old English and, albeit with pronunciation changes, into today’s word.

The beauty of English is that it’s not a pure language – it’s a hybrid, with a Germanic core and Latin overlay, with a strong streak of practicality allowing for word and pronunciation changes, and a mind-boggling breadth of expression. And unlike pure languages (from Spanish to Icelandic to Basque), English speakers themselves can call the shots on what’s useful and what’s not. So if people decide to root out, or add on, it’s pretty much just done. No Ministry of Language to say if it’s okay or not. Just voce popular. (That’s not to say there aren’t standards to be upheld – hence, this blog.) Still, it’s got a flexibility I haven’t found in any other language.

But back to “know”: anyone who knows German today also knows that they no longer use “know.” Instead, being a “two-know” language, they use “kennen” for people and places, and “wissen” for facts and things, with “wissen” rooted in the ancient Sanskrit word, “veda,” meaning “knowledge.” Other Germanic languages (from Scandinavia, Holland, etc.) use similar words. And though our words “wise” and “wit” come from that, English still has the only “k-n-o-w” verb I know of.

And just so you k-n-o-w, French and other Latin languages also started out with “gno,” but ended up attaching the prefix, “co,” (meaning “with”) to the Romanized, “gnoscere,” creating, “cognoscere,” which is still Italian for knowing people and places. The French, Spanish and Portuguese formed their particular variations from that. The Latin (and again, still Italian) “sapere,” for knowing facts and ideas, and which became “savoir” in French and “saber” in Spanish and Portuguese, actually first meant, “to taste or perceive.” Would that mean that those cultures originally equated good taste with knowledge? I can’t help but think they would agree.

As for the “necessary vs. tradition” question: World languages other than English may find it hard to accept that they don’t need to distinguish one “know” from another – but it does seem a mere tradition at this point. Even Scottish English, which still uses the Germanic “kennen,” uses that word for people, places, facts and ideas, just as we use “know.”

Still, given how truly ancient the root words for all these “knows” are, it’s certainly possible to think that at one time it was necessary to distinguish between what a person knew from experience and memorization, and what the same person knew from visual recognition. But is the need for that distinction going the way of our little toe?

Evolutionarily speaking, English may have jumped the gun with our one “know” by millennia.

Just so you know.

Lying (or Laying?) Around

2006-11-19T19:41:00.000-05:00

My daughter emailed me yesterday:

“… btw*, yesterday mariana was like "whats the past tense of lay? is it lied or lay?? I told her that u lived for that stuff and she was like "yeah, right" and i said "seriously, my mom has a blog on the english language, lets look it up …… I remember that u did give us a lecture on the past tense of lay/lie but figures i didnt exactly keep it in my brain.”

(*btw: an Internet acronym for ‘by the way.’ FYI.)

Quickly, before I start musing on what writing emails and instant messages are doing to the next generation’s writing, spelling and punctuation (wow -- how fuddy-duddy does that sound!), or about how my children never keep my lectures in their brains; I want to say upfront that I’m happy that Mariana was even aware that she didn’t know the past tense of “lay.” Lots of people don’t know, but either they don’t know that they don’t know, or they don’t care, so they never ask or even wonder.

Sorry to say, I did not have a posting about LIE and LAY, so I’d like to remedy that situation right now – because what a difference it makes to get it right! One summer I was on the night train to Paris, something that still rings of black and white movies and romance. The reality, however, was bleak: I shared a compartment with some family from a southern U.S. state and the whole night the mother kept saying to her two-year-old, “Laaaaay doww-n, Susie! Laay down!” The experience might have been just that much less awful if the mother had said, “Lie down, Susie! LIE down!” (even with some expletives thrown in, as long as she got the grammar right).

So here’s the thing about LAY and LIE:

LAY takes an object, which makes it a “transitive” verb, so the dictionary will stick a little italicized, “tr.” next to “lay” in the dictionary. Basically, using “lay” means that you must lay SOMETHING down, as in, “Whenever I walk in the door, I lay the car keys on the table.” (I wish); or the exhausted parent who lays her baby down for a nap and then conks out herself. Or think of the prayer, “Now I lay me down to sleep.” (As you know from “Myself Misuse” – it should have said, “Now I lay myself down to sleep” but – whatever, or as my daughter would write: w/e.)

LIE does not take an object, so it is an “intransitive” verb and the dictionary will stick a little italicized “intr.” next to “lie” in the dictionary.** As in, “How do I train my dog to lie down?” or “The Atlantic Ocean lies between our two countries.” New York City lies a mere 26 miles from my home, but some days, it seems so far away, it may as well be the Atlantic Ocean.”

** To lie, meaning (among various related definitions) to rest, recline or be in a prostrate or recumbent position, comes from the Old English, “licgan.” The other meaning of “lie,” as in the intransitive verb, “to present false information with the intention of deceiving” comes from the Old English, “leogan.” (I don’t know how to pronounce those words, but I think it’s interesting that they both end up as “lie.”)

Of course, both LAY and LIE come in different verb tenses: a verb tense tells you when the action happened, and the three main ones to know are the present, the past, and the past participle. In case you’ve forgotten, the present tense describes general, routine kinds of things, like “I write my blog on Sunday;” the past tense describes and action that is over and done with, as in, “I watched an old movie yesterday;” and a participle (as verb form) usually goes with a “helping verb” like have/has/had. Think: “The Great Oz has spoken!”

So here’s LAY and LIE, present, past and participle:

TO LAY
Present: lay/lays … Who lays down the law in your house?
Past: laid … I laid my car keys down somewhere – where are they?
Past Participle: laid … That reminds me of a sign I once saw posted inside a Greenwich Village apartment building: “Walk carefully. The tiles have just been laid.” To which someone else had scrawled, “Lucky tiles!”

TO LIE (as in lie down)
Present: lie/lies … My Bonnie lies over the ocean.
Past: lay … Yesterday, my Bonnie lay down on the couch -- and on the job.
Past Participle: lain … My Bonnie has lain around for years, thinking about when to come home.

Now you begin to see where the confusion, ahem, lies. The past tense of LIE is the present tense of LAY. Even worse, saying “I lay down” sounds a lot like “I laid down” so it’s hard to hear the difference. Still, if you think of little Susie’s mom yelling in my ears all night in that train compartment, you’ll try to master this. And yes, people really do say, “lain.” Although I haven’t lain awake nights thinking about all this.

It’s interesting to note that on Google, dog training sites often stick both “lie” and “lay” in their web page titles, just to make sure no one – including Susie’s mom – misses “How to Train Your Dog to Lie Down, Lay Down;” thankfully, the instructions (in the two sites I read) only use “lie down” in the text. (Which reminds me that in Barnes & Noble’s early days in New York, they had to list the store in the phone book under both “Barnes” & Noble and “Bonds” & Noble to accommodate some of the locals’ pronunciation.)

BTW, there are two other pairs of transitive-intransitive verbs; that is, ones that are similar, except one takes an object and the other does not: RAISE -- tr. v. (raised, have/has raised) and RISE – intr. v. (rose, risen) and SET – tr. v. (set and set) and SIT – intr. v. (sat, sat). That’s why you raise a window when the thermometer rises, and not the other way around. That could also be why you set the table before you sit down to eat. Fortunately, there doesn’t seem to be too much confusion with these verbs. The real question now is, how are you going to ease your new words, “transitive” and “intransitive” into your next cocktail conversation?! Okay, okay, w/e.

"No Problem"

2006-11-02T14:45:00.000-05:00

Dear Language Lady,
Would you please consider writing a blog on the phrase "no problem?" As in my asking, "May I please have a receipt?" to which the cashier responds, "No problem!" Doesn't "no problem" presume that providing a receipt (or whatever else you may have requested, say a clean fork) might be problematic? Of course, everything is potentially problematic. But the "no problem" response often is evoked irregardless (From LL: Please see my “Leaf-Blower Awards”) of the probability of an actual problem.
-- Pissed Off in Ohio

Dear Pissed Off,

“No problem” seems to have become such an automatic reply in current English that it can mean anything from, “sure thing” (it’s approximate original meaning) to “you’re welcome,” to the ubiquitous and equally full of nuance, “whatever.” It’s so common that Internet users simply write NP instead of the whole phrase.

When your cashier tells you cheerily that giving you a receipt is “no problem,” you may translate that as meaning, “certainly,” or “of course” and not consider your request in any way problematic; however, if the cashier mutters the phrase while slapping a grease-stained receipt in your palm, you have every right to feel the way you do.

“No problem” meaning, “You’re welcome,” has long been a proper Australian response to “thank you,” because Aussies don’t even use the phrase, “You’re welcome,” which perhaps has too formal a ring about it, one that that defiantly informal culture has resisted. An Aussie’s usual response to “thanks” includes: “no worries” or “it’s nothing, mate.” Now perhaps our own Casual Friday (and often Casual Mon – Thurs, and weekends) Culture is also catching on to that meaning of the phrase. So, no worries, mate: it’s just language stretching its legs. However, that does not mean there’s not a problem with “no problem” (or multiple negatives!) Let’s go back to the coffee shop for a minute:

Let’s say you receive a dirty fork and then ask the waitress for a clean one, to which she replies, “No problem.” Well, in that case, “no problem” is the absolute wrong way to respond, because providing you with a clean fork to begin with was, actually, a “problem” (a difficulty not able to be overcome); her response should be more like: “I’m sorry! I’ll get you a clean one right away.”

It’s that type of instance -- when “no problem” allows its sayer to passively avoid admitting to making a mistake -- that inspired a whole sermon at Duke University Chapel a few years ago. In it, Rev. Dr. William Willimon, formerly of Duke and now Bishop of Northern Alabama, called “no problem” a phrase “spreading like kudzu throughout our speech …

“When I say to you, ‘Excuse me, but there is no banana in my banana split,’ it is not for you to say, ‘OK. No problem.’”

Exactly! What about, “Woops! You can’t have a banana split without a banana -- how could I have been so stupid?!” But instead, the waiter detaches himself from the mistake by uttering, “No problem.” Grrr. (And I’d check your spoon to see if it’s clean. That too could be “no problem.”)

The reverend went on to cite another instance: this time, at a garage where the mechanic had guaranteed his car would be ready by a set time:
“’Not ready?’” I repeated incredulously. “’Well, I’ll make do for another couple of days.’”
“No problem,” says the mechanic.
“And I think, ‘No problem?’ No problem for whom? For me, that you have no problem with keeping my car for another two days is, well, a problem.”

Again, a simple apology was called for but an unsatisfying “no problem” was served up instead. My question is, did the mechanic even know that he should have apologized? Did he think that “no problem” covered his mistakes, or did he think it was mighty generous of him to keep the reverend’s car parked for free in his garage another two days while he worked on it?

We live in a No-Problem culture – as anyone might surmise by noting the 27,400,000 sites listed under “no problem” on Google: “Bad Credit? No Problem!” “No Plot? No Problem!” “Terrorist Attack on the Internet? No Problem!” There are 20,000,000 more sites listed under the more festive-sounding, Spanish “No Problema” (yes, “problem” is feminine): “Lo-Carb Mexican Food -- No Problema!” “Language Barrier -- No Problema!” No one likes problems, least of all Americans, who will do just about anything to avoid them, or avoid admitting that there is one – unless they can go on Oprah or Sally Jessie Raphael or Jerry Springer to talk about it.

Not that I’m suggesting that the next time you ask your cashier for a receipt or a clean fork and she utters the NP phrase, you immediately call up one of the afternoon shows to request a chance to vent and throw some language around. It might be useful, though.

What “no problem” needs is an anti-publicity campaign to take it down a few notches and put some real meaning back into those words. So now that we’re aware of the problem, resisting the urge to say it should be no problem.

Bush and "The Google"

2006-10-28T23:28:00.000-04:00

The Great Decider has done it again. This past Monday (Oct. 23, 2006) President Bush was interviewed on CNBC and asked whether he ever googled anyone or used Google. His response: “Occasionally. One of the things I’ve used on the Google is to pull up maps.”

Does Bush do this on purpose? Did he know that saying, “One of the things I’ve used on the Google …” was going to be an instant email clip sent around the world for the next week, to be saved in special Internet files with his countless other gaffes? Typing in “bush ‘the google’” listed 2,130,000 site hits on Google and 1,840,000 on Yahoo. Does Bush really want that kind of publicity for himself? If Bush is of the belief that any publicity is good publicity, then it was another banner week for him. However, given his current standing, I think this latest gaffe was only great for Google.

Let’s just take a moment to analyze linguistically why the Googler-in-Chief’s statement caused such a reaction. Was it just the “the?” Not really. There were other things wrong with his sentence, so let’s take a look:

Bush says, “One of the things I’ve used on (Google)” is –

Now, right there, after “is,” we’re expecting to hear a NAME or type of NOUN (person, place, or thing) that Bush enjoys looking up. Instead, we get: “to pull up maps,” which is a verb phrase. Said all at once, (and leaving out “on the Google”), we get, “One of the things I’ve used is to pull up maps.” Do you see how the first half of the sentence does not complement the second? A carpenter in his workshop wouldn’t say, “One of the things I use is to hammer in nails.”
Semantically, it’s a mess; but that part is mostly unconscious to the listener. What is funny about the clip is hearing Bush say, “the Google.”

“The Google.” The last time “the” was so memorably attached to a proper noun was when Donald Trump’s first wife, the Czec-born, Ivana, called her hubby, “The Donald.” And by inserting the little “the” in front of Google, Bush set off a firestorm of blog responses -- mostly derogatory comments from the U.S. and around the world. One site I looked at, thinkprogress.org, had comments in Swedish, Polish, Spanish, German and Dutch, in addition to mostly English (from the U.S. and the U.K.) as well as a 10-second video clip leading up to and just past Bush’s saying, “the Google.”

The misuse of that one little, three-letter word seemed to act as a beacon, a come-on to anti-Bushers everywhere (who, granted, don’t need much prodding) as a justifiable chance to criticize everything from his intelligence and general character to the Iraqi war, and on down to his Texas accent. How could the word “the” be such a trigger? How could “the” mean so much?

In general, the comments on thinkprogress.org were not particularly insightful (“The Decider uses The Google to remind The Citizens he is The Dumbass.” Comment by MAN — October 27, 2006 @ 12:38 pm being one of the more concise). However, I thought this Comment by jon — October 24, 2006 @ 12:08 pm made a good point:

… I think it’s ironic that the dude leading our country during the coming of age of the on-line experience calls it the “internets” (Oct. 8, 2004) and refers to the largest search engine as “the google.” It reminds me of his father when he was campaigning for president and stopped in a grocery store to be dumbfounded by scanner checkouts. How can I put it more bluntly? OUT OF TOUCH.

No one calls Google, “the Google.” Or rather, no one ELSE does that except the leader of the free world, from whom we would all like to expect better. My husband thinks that Bush thinks computer-related things are unmanly, unsuitable for a dude who would rather be clearing brush on his ranch; whether on purpose or not, Bush uses the wrong terminology to put a distance between himself and the whole e-world. Perhaps. Still, as I have often said to my kids, “That may be a reason, but it’s no excuse.”

The Leaf Blower Awards

2006-10-22T10:24:00.000-04:00

Following are some words and expressions that generally sound awful -- the verbal equivalent of that seasonal suburban nightmare: the leaf blower. For that reason, I will be awarding “leaf blower” points on a scale of offensiveness, with 4 being the highest.

“Irregardless” (4 leaf blowers)

(Q) One reader, Bev from Virginia, writes, “My pet peeve is the use of the word ‘irregardless.’ I hear it daily. It drives me nuts. I'm counting on you to set people straight.”
(A) Well, Bev, a lot of people agree with you: when I googled that one little word, up sprang hundreds of sites, many with page-long articles about how offensive and illogical “irregardless” is; how it is nonstandard and “humorous” English to be avoided in formal writing; and that we should blame some western Indiana dialect for first using it back in 1912, probably meshing “irrespective” (meaning, without regard to something) and “regardless,” (meaning, in spite of something). “Regardless” is the correct word.

Some individual sites claim that “irregardless” is not a word, while others say that given how long the word has been around, and how often it is still used in speech and print, that sadly, yes, it IS a word – albeit a second- or even third-class verbal citizen among the better informed.

What makes “irregardless” wrong is that it’s a double negative: the prefix “ir” means “not” and the suffix “less” means “without.” So if “ir” and “less” cancel each other out, what you have is “regard,” which is roughly the opposite of what you meant to say. English, in general, doesn’t do double negatives the way they do in, say, Spanish or French; in those languages you MUST use a double-negative to be correct:

Where we say, “I don’t have anything,” a Spaniard says, “No tengo nada” and a Parisian says, “Je n’ai rien,” which are both literally, “I don’t have nothing.” Not only does this sound uneducated in English, English speakers would reason that if you don’t have “nothing,” then you must have “something.” However, a Yale professor pointed out that we still use dictionary-sanctioned, redundant words like “debone” and “unravel” without any problem.

Linguistically speaking, what may make “IRregardless” so tempting to use is that the syllable stress of that word falls on “IR,” emphasizing the “not” aspect, while in “reGARdless,” the stress falls on the fairly meaningless, “GAR.”

Regardless of such temptations, better go with the standard word until further notice.

Recommended sites re “irregardless” (in addtion to American Heritage and Merriam-Webster Dictionaries, and Wikipedia):
- British etymologist and writer Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words (I once wrote him and he actually responded):
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-irr1.htm
- Get It Write
http://www.getitwriteonline.com/archive/081002.htm
- Plus, the amusingly named, The Irregardless Café, in Raleigh, NC, which has been serving down-home food and disregarding illogical verbal constructions since 1975.
http://www.irregardless.com/cafe.html

“Nothing If Not” (3 leaf blowers)

A particularly faithful reader, my editor and husband, Bob, finds the phrase, “nothing if not,” meaning, “above all” or, simply, “very” -- as in “Bjork is nothing if not quirky” -- to be extremely over-used in writing these days (though, thankfully, people tend not to say it, which spared it a 4-star rating). “Nothing if not” is an old phrase, first coined c. 1600 in Shakespeare’s “Othello:” "I am nothing if not critical," Iago says in Scene 1. As for its over-use, Google listed no less that 1,290,000 different sites for the phrase, among them:

“If The Brown Bunny feels weirdly indulgent, it’s nothing if not a fiercely personal film …”www.deep-focus.com/flicker/brownbun.html

“Guatemala is nothing if not colorful! Here even the ever so mundane American school bus comes dressed like a Las Vegas showgirl … http://www.transportguatemala.com/chicken.htm

“Faulkner was nothing if not confused, and here, alas, the confusion damages the work. Where was that inner editor?
www.amazon.ca/ Light-August-William-Faulkner/dp/1561005886

But what none of this answers to Bob’s satisfaction is why? Are people using that phrase because it’s Shakespeare? (Doubtful.) Why waste one’s breath on the three words, “nothing if not,” if you can easily say the same thing without them? And what, really, does “nothing if not” mean?

Let’s take the sentence, “I am nothing if not perplexed.” Likewise, if I am not perplexed, I am nothing. But if I AM perplexed, then I am NOT nothing -- so I must be SOMEthing. So, in other words, “I am perplexed.”

Yes, “nothing if not” is another double-negative – but this one INTENDS to cancel both negatives, probably to emphasize the positive. Nice, huh? Leave it to Shakespeare. Which is perhaps something to keep in mind: the phrase was good for Iago – such phrases always sound so eloquent the first time – but for the rest of us, now 400 years later and with 1,290,000 site-hits and counting, “nothing if not” is nothing if not as spent as a firecracker on the 5th of July.

“At The End of the Day” (2 1/2 leaf blowers)
I hear this phrase said all the time, in many different contexts: business, between friends, on TV, and even my old linguistics professor, who said it so many times during class, I started to make notches on my notepad. But frankly, my dears, to paraphrase Rhett Butler, I just can’t get worked up about this. However, this attitude clearly sets me outside of the new group of conscientious objectors:

Cindy Adams, a gossip columnist for the New York Post, went ballistic in last Sunday’s (October 15, 2006) paper, suddenly waking up to what she considered the nauseating popularity and ubiquity of “at the end of the day.” Not the Les Miz song (“At the end of the day you’re another day older”) which stayed in my head til the end of the day, after I read Adams’s article; but the “at the end of the day” that means, “finally,” or “in the end,” as in Adams’s own examples: “At the end of the day, all you have is your family;” or “At the end of the day, it’s between you and your Maker.”

Well, we all have our verbal pet peeves and Cindy is certainly not alone with that one, even if she is a bit late in catching on to it: Google sites criticizing the phrase’s over-use go back at least 2 years. Columnist James Clark, writing for The (Johannesburg, South Africa) Star in 2004, said that in a newspaper survey readers voted “at the end of the day” as the Numero Uno, most irritating cliché.

My husband thought that the phrase was mostly used in business contexts, right up there (or down there) with “bottom line.” So I googled “bottom line” and “end of the day” in the same search box and it turned up 1,570, 000 hits. So, yes, Bob – good hunch.

Media Bistro, a site targeted to people in the media industry, had a piece in their August 15, 2006 posting, titled: At The End Of The Day, Study In Hot Pursuit Of Popular Press Clichés Reveals Low-Hanging Fruit. The article reported “a whopping 10,000 news sources, including the Wall Street Journal, Reuters and the Associated Press; in an analysis by Factiva of clichés used by the press, by far the most commonly used is ‘at the end of the day.’”

Apparently responding to the same Factiva analysis, on August 17, 2006, Philadelphia Inquirer staff writer Jane M. Von Bergen wrote:

I get excited when people sound as if they are about to emit wisdom. That “end of the day” phrase tunes me up in anticipation of a “Tuesdays With Morrie” -- level insight, something meaningful, something important … Mostly, though, I'm disappointed … In fact, the more banal the thought, the more likely it is to be preceded with “at the end of the day.” You know what I think? I think ‘at the end of the day’ has come to the end of its day.

Okay, okay, so it’s a little over-used. It STILL doesn’t bother me as much as “with he and myself.” (4 leaf blowers)

“A Slight Quiver of the Upper Lip” (0 leaf blowers – it’s a family favorite)

“A slight quiver of the upper lip,” so integral to classic hackneyed romance novels, is a phrase I grew up using and hearing at home – not often, but often enough. It was a type of code used to describe the feeling just after something you wanted (especially, to eat) was suddenly snatched from your grasp. Mom and Dad loved telling the story behind this family classic, and here’s how I remember it:

In 1966, my globe-trotting parents were on a tiny boat on the Amazon tributary’s Araguaya River. The tour guide’s first mate was James, a 28-year-old, lean and rugged, British soldier-of-fortune-type, whose ad-hoc responsibility at the (literal) end of the day was to produce from the tiny, generator-run machine the precious ice cubes for the evening’s libations. These ice cubes, symbols of civilization out there in the steamy jungle, were doled out like gold doubloons.

But one evening, just as the last ice cube was going from Dad’s hand to his glass of scotch, something happened and the ice cube bounced off the rim of the glass, then slipped, skittered and slid – plop – into the muddy river. For a moment, no one spoke. James looked at my father’s face (somewhere between crestfallen and shocked) and, perhaps seeking to relieve the gravity of the moment, piped up, “I say, David! A slight quiver of the upper lip?”

Now there are few things (besides one or two ice cubes) that could make Dad’s warm scotch taste good – and a fine and well-timed cliché, with just the right hint of irony and levity, was one of them.

Accent on America

2006-10-14T22:21:00.000-04:00

Last week I talked about The Queen’s English, and received a bunch of interesting responses. One reader, Liz from Maryland, had this to say: “Actually, English spoken by the Royals/upper crust is beautiful to hear, don't you think? So remote, so refined, so....inbred.” Yes, Liz, I agree!

This week, I wanted to talk about accents in the U.S. Personally, I love the twangs, drawls, flat sounds, long sounds, double-vowels sounds and other regional variations that can mark our origins more precisely than any last name. There are a zillion American accents, one for every region and sometimes regions within regions. On the other hand, a lot of people speak a sort of general American English, with maybe a hint of an accent from their hometown. Maybe general American English could be called TV American -- it’s pretty much the same. Still – it’s the differences, the accents, that bring out the color in people and places and so here’s to them!

I spent two weeks every summer of my first 22 years making the annual pilgrimage from suburban Chicago to Enid, Oklahoma to visit my grandmother and a wide assortment of relatives and family friends. And I still warm to the sound of a good, southwestern, “Howdy!” “Hi Y’all!” and “How are yewwww?!” -- though living in NY makes hearing those sounds extremely rare. (Of course, I still get to hear the Queens English --- that is, Queens, New Yawwk!)

Anyway, during those annual trips south, I loved hearing the slow Oklahoma drawl – though I would have felt strange speaking that way myself. As a young teen hanging out at the Enid Tastee (the "Ta-i-Y-stee") Freeze drive-in (drahv-iyen) with my popular older cousins and their friends, my northern accent made me different, and helped explain (at least to me) the difference in our worlds: my world was Lake Michigan and bike-riding to town and friends' houses; my accent was short vowels and quickly-spoken syllables. In Enid, life was American Graffiti with a cowboy accent, cars of cheerleaders and their hunky boyfriends cruisin' on the Van Buren strip. I used to wonder, if I ever lived in Enid, how soon I'd be dropping y'alls and yer alls, and saying reaaaal slowww, “Y’all come over to MAH how-se!” Would I -- could I -- really do that?

Certainly, an accent marks you as from a certain place. So if you change your accent, you also paste over your past – and maybe that’s the point: Didn’t Cary Grant and Sean Connery come from working class families? You’d never know it by their movies.

Many people’s accents change naturally, as their lives and places they call home change. But a radical change of accent – is that the verbal equivalent of plastic surgery? Does an accent make a person, and does a new accent re-make them? I think so. What would Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig be like if they spoke like James Bond or a CNN TV correspondent?

Now let’s take a look at another accent, one that comes from …

MERLIN – that’s Maryland to the rest of us
“Merlin” is the local pronunciation of that smallish state on the mid-Atlantic coast. Now, this state, which Lord Baltimore called “Terra Mariae” in 1630, may once have been called “Mary Land;” we non-natives call it MARE-i-lnd; but the natives apparently call it “Merlin.”

The Merlin dialect is particularly strong in the triangle around the Chesapeake Bay, which, according to http://wilk4.com/humor/humorm221.htm “is bounded roughly by a line commencing at Towson's Toyota, then westward to Frederick Mall, thence following the western border of the cable TV franchise and the string of McDonalds along Route 50 to the Bay.”

Enthusiastic and informative Language Lady reader Liz, from Maryland’s Chesapeake Triangle, shares these tidbits on the local tongue:

BALMER
Maryland’s capital city, spelled Baltimore, is pronounced “Balmer.” As in the Balmer O’s, or Baltimore Orioles. There are two Balmers: Balmer City and Balmer County (also pronounced, “Canny.”) Balmer City is the locale for HAIRSPRAY – the movie/Broadway hit’s writer/director is John Waters, a native Balmerian, hon. The locals speak Balmerese. And you can’t speak Balmerese without this word:

HON
Hon is short for "Honey" and is added at the end of a sentence. A 7-11 cashier says, "Yer fly's open, hon.” or “Here's yer change, hon". (This is followed by deep, gutteral smoker's cough or laugh.) "Let's cheer fer de O's hon.”

DOWNY SHORE
“Downy shore” means "down to the shore.” The shore, or beach, is almost always Ocean (or, “Ay-shun”) City. So, “Let’s go to the beach” is, "Let's go downy shore, hon.”

NAPPLIS
Annapolis, home to the U.S. Naval Academy, is pronounced "Napplis," as in, "Gonna go see my doc in Napplis, hon."

WARSHTON
That’s the place, also called, “Washnin,” where the President lives.

Liz from Maryland is also one of the few people I know who has actually been to Bourbonnais, Illinois, a small city named after a 19th century French fur trader. Here’s what Liz had to say about her trip to my home state:

We're not going to discuss Illinois accents (Oh, really, Liz??)...We spent some time with my son’s baseball team in Bourbonnais,Ill. What fools we were at the hotel front desk to ask, "Is there a grocery store in Bourbonnais (pronounced as French word, Bur-Bohn-NAY)?" "YOU MEAN BER-BONUS? YEAH, THERE'S A WAL-MAAAART TWO MILES SOUTH". " BE CAYREFUL DRIVING INTO CHICAAAAAAHHHHHGO.”

"BER-BONUS." I think that sounds like a sexually transmitted disease.

Thanks, Liz! I’ll remember that next time I’m in Bourbonnais.

Actually, people from Illinois absolutely cringe when someone pronounces the “s” on the end of our state name. Never mind that we mangle the French pronunciation on the way to the “s” (Elll-en-OY, instead of “Illin-WAH”); but c’est la vie – or is it cest-lavvy?

(For a list of familiar French place names in the U.S., check out http://freespace.virgin.net/john.cletheroe/usa_can/places/french.htm
and see why the French shrug their Gallic shoulders when it comes to Americans speaking French.)

AM I BOVVERED? (or, More Accents on England)
Meanwhile, Diana, an expat from England who lives in New York, sent me a link to the British comedian Catherine Tate.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=409893&in_page_id=1770>
Catherine has a repertoire of characters she has invented and one of them is surly, 16-year-old Lauren, whose catch phrase, “Am I bovvered?” has caught on big time among the Brits. “Bovva” is cockney, or Estuary English (see The Queen’s English 10/8/06) for “bother,” and Catherine’s phrase is, according to the link, the new “Whatever!” or more broadly, the embodiment of “couldn't-care-less adolescence.” So the big news is that “bovver” is being considered for the next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).

Now, I know the OED is trying to keep up with current language trends and all. “Bovver” just might have some staying power in UK-speak, and might be appropriate for such an entry, especially due to the growth of “Estree English” in the past two decades (see my blog: 10/8/06). But that reminded me of the OED’s inclusion of “muggle” into the 2003 OED edition, and I’ve always felt the editors got a little too caught up in the whole Harry Potter Hysteria to include that word. I mean, I love the stories and all, but I have never heard a single soul of any age use “muggle” outside of Harry Potter.

J.K. Rowling’s “muggle,” means someone without magical powers; the OED editors, however, claim that the word has taken on an extended use to mean, “any person lacking a particular skill, or is seen as somehow inferior,” to merit the entry. (See: http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/uk/newsid_2882000/2882895.stm)

Can anyone vouch for that? I’d love to know if I’m wrong.

Likewise, my prediction for “bovver,” in the U.S. Surely, “bovver” will not make it into the OED American-English edition, as Cockney Cool has not made it here at all – and it may not get any farther than the backstage of some struggling English punk band playing a 2 a.m. gig in Queens, New Yawwk. But that’s just my opinion, hon.

Comments on Comments: Let’s Nuke Nu-kyuh-ler

2006-10-11T00:33:00.000-04:00

All that talk about accents in my last posting (The Queen’s English, 10/8/06) stirred up some thoughts – not just from my chair but from others’ as well:

Danny from California said that English aristocrats weren’t the only ones putting the common touch in their English, by noting that our own President Bush may be doing the same thing every time he says, “nu-kyuh-ler,” instead of “nu-klee-ar.” But in that particular case, Danny also noted, it’s “more like the ignorant in high places taking pride in their ignorance – a classic southern phenomenon.”

Actually, Danny, the mispronouncing of “nuclear” is not, alas, just a southern (or southwestern) thing, since Gerald Ford from Michigan supposedly had trouble with the blasted word too! It’s not an accent problem, so much as just general inattention to syllables – and it’s the inattention to that detail that drives people nuts.

According to The Big Book Of Beastly Mispronunciations: The Complete Opinionated Guide For The Careful Speaker, author Charles Harrington Elster says that out of the 100 most often mispronounced words, the mangling of “nuclear” is the one that causes the most vehement reaction among listeners who have no patience for those users – particularly mis-users like Presidents of the United States both past and present who continually, and seemingly, stubbornly fail to say it right. Elster quotes lexicographer R.W. Burchfield (editor of the four-volume Oxford English Dictionary) who points out, “the spectacular blunder of pronouncing [nuclear] as if it were spelled nuc-u-lar” is the result of a tempting misassociation with the many words ending in-ular (circular, particular, cellular, secular, molecular, jocular, avuncular, etc.).”

The switching of sounds in a word has a long history in English: Think of “aks” for “ask,” “purdy” for “pretty,” or the classic childhood “pasketti” for “spaghetti.” In language circles, this is called “metathesis” (pron.: me TAA thah sis – see if you can work that into your next cocktail conversation …). (Our word, for example, “butterfly” is possibly a metathesis for the original, “flutter-by.”)

But metathesis or not, there’s just no excuse for mispronouncing such a fear-inspiring word when you’re President of the United States. Former laughingstock Vice Prez Dan Quayle is probably at home wondering what the big deal was about his not being able to spell “potato.” Next to nu-kyu-ler, that’s small potatoes indeed, and here’s why:

If a President of the United States can’t be bothered to hear and articulate the difference between “spectacular” and “nuclear,” then what’s his finger doing on the button anyway?

The Queen’s English

2006-10-08T00:02:00.000-04:00

As I sat on the subway yesterday evening, the woman asking me which stop took her to Soho had a definite accent -- a little Mick Jagger, a little Merchant-Ivory -- and I asked if she were from England (as opposed to Australia or South Africa). Turns out she was from Yorkshire, where the movie, “The Full Monty,” as well as the children’s book/movie, “The Secret Garden” take place. I told her I was about to go see “The Queen,” and she said over the years she’d seen the Queen several times herself. I said that I really just meant the movie, “The Queen” – we laughed and then joked about how funny it would be to see Her Royal Highness sitting and signing autographs in the lobby of the Angelika Theater.

Now cut back to London, 1997, “The Queen’s” starting point, when newly elected Prime Minister Tony Blair is about to meet Queen Elizabeth. On the way up Buckingham Palace’s winding stairs, a staff person spouts off the protocol for being In Presence (that’s what it’s called when you’re with the Queen); and when the man tells Tony to call the queen “ma’am,” he emphasizes: “’ma’am’ that rhymes with ‘ham,’ and not ‘mahm’ that rhymes with ‘fahm’” (or farm). Apparently, minding his P’s and Q’s was not enough – the P.M. had to watch his “A’s” as well!

But that was just the kind of thing I wanted to hear: I had headed off to see this movie last night not only because I’d read the good reviews and usually enjoy period and historical movies -- and actually remember something of the time portrayed (the week after Princess Diana’s death); but an even more compelling reason to go was that I wanted to listen to the English accents. Specifically, I wanted to hear any evidence of a type of “down market” pronunciation that has reportedly been seeping into the speech habits of upper class English people for the past 20 or so years. (Confusing the “a” in “ham” or “farm” is not part of that phenomenon though -- maybe it just grates on the Queen’s nerves.)

Called Estuary English after the Thames estuary region in London and southeast England where this variety of English began, it was documented in 1984 by linguist David Rosemarne and his been the subject of much interest and debate ever since. My own research into this topic was inspired by a comment sent in by Icedink (see Language Lady, "Myself Misuse," 9/24/06). These particular pronunciation variations, found increasingly in and around London are partly adapted from Cockney and supposedly add a dash of working class/I’m-one-with-the-people sort of cache – the kind of thing that aristocrats might do to sound cool, or maybe just less remote, and politicians might do to better fit in with their constituents.

Still, the Queen’s problem in the movie was that she did not connect with her people through public displays of emotion, much less any subtle speech affectations to sound like them; in fact, trying to effect a more common accent would have been the last thing on the mind of Helen Mirren’s Queen Elizabeth (and probably on the real one’s too). As for Michael Sheen’s Tony Blair, who definitely wanted to connect with the people -- and succeeded -- he nonetheless seemed to stick to his Oxford-honed English as he delivered his speeches to the mourning masses. And his upper class accent also supported him in his oh-so carefully chosen words each time he tried to persuade the Queen to leave Balmoral and come to London.

Yet my grand mission of detecting the down-market sounds of Estuary (pronounced "estree" according to Icedink) English in those upper class protagonists was ultimately flawed from the get-go: the attempt failed to take into account that I really don’t have any trained ear for the subtleties I was listening for. Okay, I listen to British-narrated books on tape. But other than that, I’m an American surrounded by Americans. What was I thinking?

If The Queen or the Prime Minister were Estuary English-dropping any t’s (making “butter” sound like “buh-err”) or turning “l’s” into “w’s,” (making “milk” sound like “mewk” and “will you” sound like “w-i-w you”), I didn’t catch them. Except I did think I once heard Tony say, “peo-puw” instead of “peo-pul” (people) – but I also kept forgetting to listen while I got caught up in the show.

However, if you plan to see the movie, perhaps you can do a better job than I did, and then let me know – especially re Tony and his staff. Also Cherie Blair, Tony’s wife, was portrayed as a strong anti-monarchist – did she use Estuary English at all? Again, I forgot to listen.

Still, I did notice other things, like:

Wow! Helen Mirren really captured The Queen as I imagine her. I remember hearing The Real Queen give her belated Princess Diana condolence speech – and remember now how high her voice sounded, and that I hadn’t expected it to sound that way. It was like her words were going through a sieve, morphing into shrill little bubbles en route from her mouth to the air. Helen Mirren captured that sound – which I think was probably due to nerves, because otherwise in the movie, the Queen didn’t sound so tinny. (Overly proper, stiff, etc. – but not tinny.)

The other thing that I remembered about seeing The Real Queen give that condolence speech was that she looked JUST LIKE our former housekeeper, Dorothy, who lived with us almost forever. Dorothy had the exact same hair-do as the Queen, the same pale complexion, full cheeks, and short stature. As I stared at the TV that day, I had a Separated At Birth moment, where it looked like Dorothy, not the Queen, was addressing the world. But how different Dorothy seemed with that accent! And how different the Queen would have seemed if she had spoken like a woman who grew up in McHenry, Illinois!

Which brings up the next Posting:
Do accents make people or vice-versa?
Think about it: whose accent would you want to have? Would that change you? Stayed tuned.

Double-Izzers

2006-10-01T15:19:00.000-04:00

What, you may wonder, is a double-izzer? For one, it’s a term made up by Paul (though he may not be the only one to have thought of it, he’s the only one I know who uses it), a recent acquaintance who requested this posting, and who brought the whole matter to my attention.

But what IS a double-izzer you ask.

Well, before I tell you, try saying the word again without looking at the spelling and you may just guess: the thing IS, IS we say often these two same words together, sometimes pausing (and using a comma) and sometimes just running them together (sans comma), without even realizing how it sounds.

Have you ever heard, or said yourself, “The thing is, is that …” or “What the problem is is that …” For more double-izzer options, you can substitute “thing” or “problem” with “point” or “reason.”

Paul googled and printed out a Linguist blog from January 1992, a Disc entitled, “Is, is” – so this is not a new issue. Different bloggers on that early Internet file pointed to studies dating to the 1970’s, and to hearing/using the construction as far back as the 1950’s. Paul himself said he currently notices double-izzers all the time, particularly on TV interviews with politicians … which brings to mind the most famous (or infamous) double-izzer of them all:

The one from Bill Clinton’s 1998 impeachment trial when he said, “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” Of course, that context and usage is entirely different from the run-of-the-mill doubler-izzers but it’s still up there for sheer originality and quest for precision.

So the question is: Is this “is, is” construction “correct?” That depends on the meaning of the word, “correct.” One of the university linguists from January 1992 refers to a 1989 paper whose author, David Tuggy, says that “is, is” is (hey—a triple izzer!) an example of an ungrammatical construction becoming technically grammatical: that by making “What the problem is” the subject, and the double “is” the verb, the sentence is technically all right. (I think that’s the gist of it). But whether or not it’s a GOOD sentence is another question.

I think the problem is that using double-izzers is along the lines of adding “um” and “uh” to give you more time to think. Consider: “The problem is, (count: one, two) is that …” It could even be related to the “like-you know” stalling-for-time structure: “The problem is like, you know, that I …”

Paul and others would probably be less bothered by clean, orderly, and clear-thinking single-izzers as in, “The answer is that (for example) you don’t have to say, ‘WHAT the answer is, is;’ you can simply delete the “what” and de-glom the initial “is” and instead just head right for the point.

The thing is, is that that’s sometimes easier said than done.

"Myself" Misuse

2006-09-24T12:27:00.000-04:00

Correct language was A Must in my family as I was growing up. Subject matter was not so important, which is why our dinner discussions frequently centered on school lunch. Other families may have been discussing Vietnam or the break-up of the Beatles, but we heaped our passions on things like the vile cafeteria ravioli, served on plastic, pale yellow platters in the years when canned Spaghettios were all I otherwise knew of “pasta.” At our dinner table, no subject was too minor. But godfahbid you say something ungrammatical, like, “to Tom and I” and talk would instantly come to a standstill, while Mom and Dad detonated from opposite ends of the table:

Dad (fork clattering to plate, hand over heart): “Oh! Not Tom and IIIIII!” while Mom (fork clutched in midair while she leans into the table): “You mean, Tom and MEEEEEEE!” Confusing when to use “me,” “him” or “her” (object pronouns) instead of “I,” “he,” and “she” (subject pronouns) was an offense of such order that my sisters, brother and I (note that I did not say, “me, my sisters and brother”) mastered the rule fairly quickly -- so it’s not like the above example occurred more than once, but there were many other pitfalls we all fell into, with much the same reactions.

Now, many years later, one of my language-conscious sisters has asked me to address the Myself Misuse. That is, why people, particularly well-educated people, use “myself” instead of “I” or “me,” in sentences like “Jessie, Tom and myself are giving the presentation;” or, “He offered to talk to Julie and myself.” Yes, ouch. (There is also, by extension, Yourself Misuse, as in: “Hey, how are you?” “Fine, and yourself?” where a simple, “Fine and you?” would be fine.)

A multi-degreed history professor of mine at my Distinguished College was the first Myself Misuser I ever encountered, which is a perfect example of how the Myself Misusers tend to be highly educated. So why the misuse? In my opinion (as opposed to any research or fact), it’s because these Highly Educated People are aware that there are tricky pronouns out there that occasionally, if used inappropriately, cause people like Mom and Dad to burst; and yet these Misusers are not grammatically inclined enough to wonder how and why their usage might be wrong. Besides, they might think “Myself” has an air of importance about it, its two syllables lording it over the humble “I” or “me.” Say it: “Myself” – nice the way it stretches out, a veritable linguistic life raft AND such a seemingly neutral way to sidestep any potential pronoun landmines. What they don’t realize is that their “solution” is just creating one more landmine.

Isn’t it just perfectly natural to say, “I cut myself!” or “She bought herself a new dress,” or “You should consider yourselves lucky,” and so on. Those are the right uses for these –self or –selves words, called “reflexive pronouns.” They can also be used for emphasis: “Can’t you go there yourself?!” or, listen to any two-year-old: “I do it myself.”

What’s happening in all those examples is that the reflexive pronouns are referring to the subject of the sentence:

YES: Jim likes to take long walks by himself.
NO: Jim took a walk with Bob, Emily and myself.
YES: Jim took a walk with Bob, Emily and me.
NO: Bob, Emily and myself are here to talk about grammar.
YES: Bob, Emily and I are here to talk about grammar.

Now that you are Highly Educated about this matter, you can either spread the word against Myself Misuse – or not. I promised myself that I would try, but you, ahem, can suit yourself.