Kate Middleton won't obey, follows in Diana's footsteps
Lucy Carne in London
April 23, 201112:00AM
KATE Middleton will copy Princess Diana and omit the word "obey" from her wedding vows.
The future Queen of England will instead promise to "love, comfort, honour and keep" Prince William.
Diana was the first royal to refuse to "obey" when she married Prince Charles in 1981 at the age of 20.
William's grandmother, the Queen, and his aunts Princess Anne, Sarah Ferguson and Sophie Wessex used the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, which requires brides to "love, cherish and obey".
Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, who will marry William and Kate at Westminster Abbey on Friday, said he does not support the use of "obey" in wedding vows.
He said it was outdated and could be used to justify domestic violence.
Dr Williams revealed he had spoken to the couple advising them on the "courage and the clarity" they will need to live out their marriage "in the full glare" of the public eye.
He described them as "deeply unpretentious people" who were clear about what mattered about their wedding day.
"William and Catherine are making this commitment very much in the public eye and they're sensible, realistic young people," he said.
"They know what the cost of that might be. They've thought that through."
Referring to the broken marriages of Prince Charles, Prince Andrew and Princess Anne, Dr Williams said: "I hope they'll be given the strength and the persistence to go on showing the rest of us what's possible for the whole of their life together."
Clarence House refused to comment, saying any conversation between Dr Williams and the couple was private.
*women moving away from "to obey" = modern woman. Wedding vows (language) reflect the tradtionalist views of the pre-21st century era. Sexist language? Women obeying men?
IMAGINE you are trying to think of a name for a legal-services auction site. (A client needs a simple will; he describes it on the site, and lawyers bid on the job.) What did you come up with?
All right, now think of another. Then another. Do this one billion times.
Was any of the billion names you came up with Shpoonkle? I'll bet it wasn't. But it was someone's name for exactly such a company. Today's deadline day so no time for more commentary here; just read Nancy Friedman, a branding and company-naming expert, on why your first billion tries did not produce Shpoonkle.
Addendum: Deadline having passed, I realised on my trip home why you probably didn't come up with "Shpoonkle": it's forbidden by English phonotactics (basically what sounds can be strung together in a native English word. "gork" is nonsense, but obeys English phonotactic rules; "gkor" is nonsense and violates the rules.) The sh- sound plus another consonant like p* can't begin a native English word: we have shmuck, shmutz, schmaltz, shmendrick, Sturm und Drang and so on. But they're all German or Yiddish, which is why Big Legal Brain mockingly called Shpoonkle "the new Yiddish-language lawyer bidding and matching service". It's one thing to come up with a name that violates English orthographic rules, I suppose. Flickr and PwC and Yahoo! have all in their way done their worst, and haven't suffered too much for it, because their names remain naturally pronounceable. It's another thing to violate English's rules of pronunciation; I have tried and failed to think of a company that has done so successfully with their brand name in English. If anyone can think of one, let us know in the comments. Otherwise, I leave you with the words of Robert Niznik, Shpoonkle's founder:
Some people don’t like change, others don’t like what they don’t understand or better yet don’t want to understand... Well, get ready, Shpoonkle is here and we are ready for the mainstream. Kleenex, Blog, Xerox, and yes even Internet were silly names people mocked and thought were ridiculous too. Now these words are part of our every day language.
Shpoonkle: could it be the next internet?
* I originally wrote that sh + consonant is forbidden, but Ben Zimmer notes that of course shr- is allowed, as in "shrimp" and "shriek". r is unusual in being a "liquid" consonant, often barely noticeable in itself and only seen in its colouring of a neighboring vowel.
MOST people whose accents shift around are a bit sheepish when they realise it, or talk about it. Tourists who visit other countries find themselves mimicking the local rhythm or a few sounds, and when they see they're doing it, get embarrassed. (It's so common that they really shouldn't be.) And I've noticed people who have moved far from home lapse back into a more home-inflected accent when they talk to family. I do the same myself; I think I speak a sort of General American most of the time, but I get distinctively southern-inflected talking to family in Georgia, whose English is not demurely "inflected" but is full-on (lowland) southern English.
Both of these are examples of "accommodation": we tend to talk like the people we're talking to. It's true of other features like speed or volume. Talking to a motormouth, most people speed up themselves, for example.
But I noticed something interesting when trawicks at the Dialect Blog featured "transplants", people who have lived away from home a long time. Exhibit A is Bill Bryson, a journalist and author from Iowa who has lived most of his adult life in England. I hadn't realised just how English Bryson's accent had become until I heard the first clip. Around :21, he says "it is, you know, it is, it is, every bit" with a pronunciation of the t sound that sounds extremely English.
But later, he starts to describe a hockey jersey he had played with as a child as part of a superhero costume. At about 1:16, you can hear him say "it" again and again, referring to the jersey. It sounds quite different, sometimes still British-influenced, but often sounding perfectly American. This is just one example of my overall impression: telling a story that happened in America, he sounds clearly more American than he had at the beginning of the interview. He almost certainly didn't think about doing it, but the memory of Iowa is reflected in his speech.
I've noticed the same many times. An Irish colleague who has lived in New York for a long time can sound nearly American most of the time. But when I stick my head in her office and ask about language back home in Ireland, I could always swear that even the thought made her accent shift towards a much more Irish one. I wondered for a while if it was my imagination. Now the Bryson video makes it seem obvious: we accommodate not only to where we are and whom we're talking to, but where we are and whom we're talking to mentally, too.
AMERICA'S tax-filing season ended Monday; accountants are still sleeping it off and ordinary Americans just glad the ordeal is over for another twelve months, even those who got a refund. Tax-filing is extraordinarily complicated in America, despite the country's reputation as low-tax and libertarian in things economic. This is why both of the (otherwise radically different) deficit plans of Barack Obama and Paul Ryan, a congressman, call for simplifying the code.
And so speaking of confusing statutes, via Going Concern, an accounting blog, I found this New York Timescitation of section 509(a), "legendary as the most difficult sentence to understand in the tax code." Are you ready for it?
For purposes of paragraph (3), an organization described in paragraph (2) shall be deemed to include an organization described in section 501(c)(4), (5), or (6) which would be described in paragraph (2) if it were an organization described in section 501(c)(3).
OVER at Language Log is a discussion of a new directive that is intended to get executive agencies to cut the jargon and acronyms in writing intended for the public. Johnson certainly applauds that effort. But Mark Liberman and other commentators note a few ironies. One is that the guidance itself is pretty confusingly worded, as is the underlying statute (like many other statutes). Mr Liberman's peeve is the confusing scope of conjunctions in acts of Congress: how to interpret simple ands, ors and buts ends up taking up a lot of appellate courts' time.
The second irony, noted by Matt Negrin at Politico, is the name of the set of rules designed to cut masses of capital letters. It is the Plain Language Action and Information Network. (Update: see correction below.) Get it? PLAIN? Ugh. This from the sausage factory that brought you the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001. As David Rees wrote in his comic "Get Your War On", "I still can't believe they named that thing the fuckin' USA-PATRIOT Act. Grown-ups did that. Never forget that." If I were in Congress I'd sponsor a Prohibiting Naming Laws With Cute Titles Act, or the PNLWCT Act, avoiding initial vowels just to make sure that it's unpronounceable.
Mr Liberman says he doesn't mind acronyms. In technical writing (including statues) you have to refer to specific entities over and over, and some of them have long names. But there is usually an easy way around this, which Bill Walderman notes and The Economist's style book prescribes: after first mention, use the main noun on second mention: The European Commission, and thereafter "the commission"; the International Atomic Energy Agency and thereafter "the agency". And statutes or other technical writing can accomplish this with a bit of legalese in parentheses such as "(hereinafter 'the act')". Only when you have competing acts or commissions in the same article or statute do you have to distinguish which one you mean each time.
Correction: PLAIN isn't the rulebook, but the group of federal employees that has organised to fight for clearer langauge. It is not new, but hails from the 1990s. The group's website is here. Thanks to Ben Zimmer for the correction.
*Bill Walderman:
One other choice: you can introduce short forms of reference, such as National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (hereinafter, the "Institute"); Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor (hereinafter, a "transistor"). Actually, you don't need "hereinafter" or even the quotation marks. In a statute or regulation, you can use short-form defined terms with definitions that are limited in scope to a particular provision. ("For purposes of this section, the term "Institute" shall mean the National Institute of . . . "). Using a noun instead of an acronym can sometimes be more helpful to the reader than using an acronym or repeating a long-winded official name.
This proposition seems much easier to understand as readers would have to check back to see what NICHHD mean and that it actually referred to an institute. Is it easier to add a semantics onto an existing word, or remember a new 'word' and its semantics???
GREG MORTENSON claims to have tried and failed to climb K2 (the world's second-highest mountain), stumbled into a village alone after being separated from his party on the way down, and been nursed back to health by kind villagers. He also claims to have been kidnapped, years later, by the Taliban in Waziristan. He wrote a book, "Three Cups of Tea", which has become something of a manual for understanding Central Asia, even being given to American troops serving there. And he has started an organisation called the Central Asia Institute that builds schools and offers other services in the region.
Now Mr Mortenson is being accused by CBS News of fabricating some of his stirring tales. (He is also accused of potential financial improprieties regarding CAI money, not the subject of this post.) CBS spoke to two porters who left K2 with Mr Mortenson, contradicting his claim to have stumbled alone into the village of Korphe.
Mr Mortenson's written response blames the confusion on the Balti language of the people of Korphe:
Even the Balti language — an archaic dialect of Tibetan — has only a vague concept of tenses and time. For example, "now" can mean immediately or sometime over the course of a whole long season. The concept of past and future is rarely of concern.
Calling Balti an "archaic dialect" is odd; it is a full-blown language according to Ethnologue, and no language is any more archaic than any other. But this seems as though it might be an attempt to set up a linguistic defence: Balti, being archaic and a mere dialect and all, doesn't have concepts of time that would allow the villagers to be reliable in contradicting Mr Mortenson.
People should know by now that this kind of thing can be checked. Just because Korphe may not have a broadband connection doesn't mean that Mr Mortenson is the only person who has learned about its language. Mark Liberman found a book on tense and aspect in Tibetan languages, which includes a discussion of Balti:
Balti and Ladakhi, spoken under Pakistan and India regime, are not mere Tibetan dialects, but have, in contrast to Central Tibetan, generalized the past marker suffix -s for controlled action verbs, have introduced a general Past Marker and thus have fully grammaticalized the concept of TENSE-A, …
And so on. Balti's alleged lack of care for time is not getting Mr Mortenson off the hook here.
In fact, English can allow a lot of vagueness in describing a sequence of events in time. Could Mr Mortenson be taking advantage of our archaic dialect's ambiguity? CBS asked him point-blank in writing:
Did you really stumble into Korphe after failing to summit K2?
Mr Mortenson's words his response rather oddly for a man who claims to have wandered into the village near death:
Yes, I first visited Korphe village, Braldu valley, Baltistan, Pakistan after failing to summit K2 in 1993.
"Visited" is a strange word in this context, if Mr Mortenson indeed staggered in by chance. And "after failing to summit K2 in 1993" leaves him rather a lot of temporal wiggle-room. The "1993" bit can refer to the failed K2 attempt, not the visit, so "I first visited Korphe after failing to summit K2 in 1993" can mean "I first visited Korphe in 1994." It doesn't have to mean that, but it certainly can.
A final bit of linguistic interest concerns Mr Mortenson's story of being kidnapped by the Taliban. CBS asked:
Were you kidnapped for eight days by the Taliban in Waziristan in 1996? Three of the men in the photo you published in Stones into Schools deny that they kidnapped you and say they are not Taliban.
Mr Mortenson reiterates clearly that he was detained for eight days against his will. But were they Taliban?
A "Talib" means student in Arabic, and yes there were Taliban in the region.
Nobody is claiming that there were no Taliban in the region. And indeed talib does mean "student" in Arabic. But this doesn't make any old student a member of the Taliban any more than a brother who is a Muslim is ipso facto a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. And Arabic is not the language of this region; Pushtu is, and according to this dictionary, "student" in Pushtu is either zkadawunkay, shalgerd, mota'lem, mohasel or maktabi. Some of these words are Arabic borrowings (like mota'lem), but talib isn't among them. So I'm surmising that Taliban among Pashto-speakers refers specifically to the Islamist militia, not any group of students. If Mr Mortensen was indeed held hostage by students, the explanation that talib means "student" in Arabic will not mean that he was taken by the Taliban as we know it.
A COLLEAGUE is writing about "celanthropy", and catching his tweets in mid-stream I had no idea what he was talking about. Ben Affleck came up, and I thought maybe he'd recently started some kind of advanced degree, as James Franco has, at some university with a good master's program in celanthropy. Only after reading the word a few times did I realise what it was. Maybe you were quicker than I was to analyse the portmanteau of "celebrity philanthropy".
Or maybe you were slow to get it too. I think "celanthropy" has a couple of problems. One is that it wasn't obvious to me where the stress lay; for some reason I first mentally heard it as SEL-an-thro-py. Sel-AN-thro-py makes more sense when I think about it, as it matches the pattern of philanthropy and misanthropy. But then comes my next problem: misanthropy and philanthropy combine two Greek roots. There's nothing wrong with joining Greek and Latin roots. (Fowler and other traditionalists have criticised it, but unless you're still fighting against "television" and "amoral", this battle is pretty much over.) But since actual Greek roots begin with ce- like "cephalous", I was trying to figure out what the right root might be here. Finally, a good portmanteau is fairly balanced between its parts, I think: fantabulous is pretty nearly half-fantastic and half-fabulous. Chocoholic, too. Celanthropy is too much -anthropy, not enough celebrity.
This isn't scientific, but aesthetic: with all respect for my colleague, I vote "celanthropy" as unlikely to succeed. It's just a little too weird.
*the blend/portmanteau of words need to be balanced enough so that one can deduce the original two words
A bit sad, but...
The site even sells merchandise branding the missuse of the phrase...
What is "Begging the Question?"
"Begging the question" is a form of logical fallacy in which a statement or claim is assumed to be true without evidence other than the statement or claim itself. When one begs the question, the initial assumption of a statement is treated as already proven without any logic to show why the statement is true in the first place.
A simple example would be "I think he is unattractive because he is ugly." The adjective "ugly" does not explain why the subject is "unattractive" -- they virtually amount to the same subjective meaning, and the proof is merely a restatement of the premise. The sentence has begged the question.
What is it Not?
To beg the question does not mean "to raise the question." (e.g. "It begs the question, why is he so dumb?") This is a common error of usage made by those who mistake the word "question" in the phrase to refer to a literal question. Sadly, the error has grown more and more common with time, such that even journalists, advertisers, and major mass media entities have fallen prey to "BTQ Abuse."
While descriptivists and other such laissez-faire linguists are content to allow the misconception to fall into the vernacular, it cannot be denied that logic and philosophy stand to lose an important conceptual label should the meaning of BTQ become diluted to the point that we must constantly distinguish between the traditional usage and the erroneous "modern" usage. This is why we fight.
How long should we cling to a word's original meaning?
By Ben YagodaPosted Thursday, April 7, 2011, at 10:08 AM ET
Suppose a friend said to you, "I know you're disinterested, so I want to ask you a question presently." Then he didn't say anything. Would you be momentarily nonplussed?
Quite likely, yes. The above paragraph contains four words whose primary definitions have changed or are currently changing. Disinterested traditionally meant "impartial," and now is generally used to mean "uninterested." Presently has gone from "shortly" to "currently"; momentarily from "for a moment" to "in a moment"; and nonplussed from perplexed to unimpressed, or fazed to unfazed. To lend support to my theory that the new meanings now dominate popular usage, I gave an ungraded and anonymous quiz to one of my college classes—an advanced writing seminar. Here is the percentage who gave the "wrong"/new definition:
Weall know that words change their meanings all the time, sometimes glacially (the prescriptivists have long been fighting on behalf of the "impartial" sense of disinterested) sometimes relatively quickly (that nonplussed thing snuck up on me).* But this fact raises a question (it doesn't beg the question—that means something else): How long should we hold on to a word's old meaning?
This is a subset of the larger issue—an ethical one, really—of how we should deploy our language knowledge. Some people—often children of English teachers or Anglophiles—proudly wear their knowledge on their sleeve, and adopt hypercorrect linguistic behavior. Take Ray Magliozzi, the less laughter-prone of NPR's Car Talk guys, who turns his sentences into pretzels so as to avoid ending them with prepositions: a "rule" that has been out of favor for roughly half a century. (Ray consequently favors the phrase "with which.") I actually heard him use the word "shall" on last week's show.A subclass of this group favors ur-renditions of common expressions. Adopting the diction of George Gissing or Walter Pater, they will choose stamping (instead of stomping) grounds, champing (instead of chomping) at the bit, pompons (instead of pompoms), or titbits (instead of tidbits).* Such archaism seems designed to attract attention, and nothing more.
But using a meaning on its way to extinction can be nobler than such exhibitionism. Balancing the possibility that you'll confuse your audience, and the prospect of appearing pretentious or dorky, is the chance that the old meaning could be a really good meaning, which no other word conveys precisely. There is no exact synonym for (the old-fashioned) disinterested, for example. In such cases, keeping a "legacy" sense in circulation is laudable activism in pursuit of semantic sustainability—as if you found some members of a near-extinct species of mollusk and built a welcoming environment in which they could breed.
So, pedantry on one side, conservation on the other. What's needed is an algorithm to help you decide where on the continuum a particular word or expression lies.
Guess what: I have such an algorithm! Or, more precisely, I have a somewhat arbitrary metric. In the chart below, the number under the percent sign indicates the proportion of the first 20 hits on a Google News search reflecting a word's oldmeaning. The "utility rating" is my view of how valuable that old meaning is. Lion's share gets a 0 because it is a cliché and one can express the traditional meaning simply by saying all. Fortuitous gets a 2 because accidental or coincidental mean pretty much, though not exactly, the same thing. Disinterested gets a 3.
To get the score, I took the percentage of Google hits that used the old meanings and added the utility ratings: 20 points for 1, 40 for 2, and 60 for 3. The final score correlates roughly with academic grades. That is, 65 or better means the old sense still passes, and you should feel free to use it. If it doesn't pass, you can either convert to the new sense or, if that's too painful, avoid the word entirely.
If you are champing at the bit to decimate me, be ready, because I will be done presently.
Word
Traditional Definition
New Definition(s)
%
Utility Rating
Score
Beg the question
Assume a claim is true without evidence other than the claim itself (circular logic)
Prompt or raise a question
5%
3
65
Decimate
Kill one-tenth of a population
Kill or eliminate a large enough proportion of something so as to render it ineffective
0%
0
0
Disinterested
Lacking a selfish reason to favor a particular side in a debate or contest, and therefore impartial
Uninterested
15%
3
75
Eke out
Make a small amount of something last, with sparing use
Achieve narrowly and laboriously
0%
3
60
Fortuitous
Accidental; unplanned
Lucky
5%
2
45
Fulsome
Offensively excessive
Abundant; full
0%
2
40
Hoi polloi 1
The common people
The fancy people 2
90%3
1
110
Lion's share
All or nearly all
The majority
0%
0
0
Momentarily
For a moment
In a moment; presently
80%4
1
100
Nonplussed
Perplexed
Unfazed; nonchalant
45%
2
85
Presently
Shortly
Now; currently
0%
2 5
60 6
Toothsome
Delectable; attractive
Having big or prominent teeth; quality of a food that is dense or chewy
30%
2
70
Verbal
In words
Oral; spoken
0%
2
40
1Pedants and classics majors will point out that it is incorrect to say "the hoi polloi," because in Greek, hoi means the. 2Probably because it sounds like "hoity toity." 3I did not include two articles that discussed the proper meaning of hoi polloi. 4This is a misleadingly low number, I would say, since the new meaning of momentarily is most often used conversationally, and hence is not likely to show up in news reports. Most of the Google News new-meaning citations are real-time updates, for example, "More details will be added to this story momentarily." 5The new meaning of momentarily denotes the traditional meaning of presently. 6I have made an executive decision to raise the score of presently by twenty points because context makes clear that the traditional meaning indicates a future action or occurrence, reducing confusion or ambiguity.
Update, April 8, 2011: As a reader identifying himself or herself as Jamougha has correctly pointed out, the use of disinterested to mean "uninterested" is not "new," and I was being imprecise to call it that. It goes back to the 17th century—as does using the word to mean "impartial" or "neutral," which I equally imprecisely described as "traditional." There's a similar history to presently. The Oxford English Dictionary cites uses to mean both "in a little while" (which I called "traditional") and "now" (which I called "new") back to the 15th century.
Here is a more precise account. Around the middle of the 20th century—not coincidentally, the time when the lion's share of present-day language prescriptivists were developing their prescriptivism—a consensus developed about various "rules" and meanings, including disinterested and presently. A key text reflecting that consensus is the second edition of H.M. Fowler's A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, which was published in 1965 and was the work of Sir Ernest Gowers. Gowers defines disinterested as "free from personal bias." He notes that OED called the "uninterested" sense "obsolete" until a 1933 edition, when it removed the designation, and says "this revival has since gathered strength." Sir Ernest did not approve, concluding, "A valuable differentiation is thus in need of rescue, if it is not too late."
As for presently-to-mean-"currently," the usage note in the current edition of the OED is a noncommittal model of its kind: "Apparently avoided in literary use between the 17th and 20th centuries, but in regular use in most English dialects and by Scottish writers; revived in the 20th cent. in the U.S., subsequently in Britain and elsewhere. Regarded by some usage writers, esp. after the mid 20th cent., as erroneous or ambiguous." Sir Ernest, predictably, raised an eyebrow at this use, commenting, "It is now enjoying a vigorous revival, though whether for any better reason than novelty hunting may be doubted, seeing that we have available for the same purpose not only now but also for those who dislike monosyllables at present and currently."
The history of both words illustrates the truth that, when it comes to language, there is no right or wrong in a metaphysical sense, only a consensus that holds for a particular period of time. And hold your comments: by consensus I mean the "new" sense of "general agreement," not the "traditional" sense of "unanimous agreement"!
Correction,April 8, 2011: This article originally stated that prescriptivists have been fighting on behalf of the "original" sense of disinterested (meaning "impartial") for centuries. Actually the fight's been going on since about the middle of the 20th, and it's not quite accurate to call "impartial" the "original" sense of disinterested for reasons outlined in the update. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
Correction,April 7, 2011: Because of an editing error, this article originally stated that pompon was an alteration of pompom, rather than vice versa. "Pompon" is the hypercorrect word. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
BEN YAGODA has a slightly silly but thought-provoking essay at Slate in which he proposes a two-part scale for determining which words (and phrases) we should try to stop from changing their meanings fundamentally. The usual suspects are familiar: nonplussed, presently, decimate, beg the question, fulsome and disinterested are now all used to mean something quite different from what they once meant. Mr Yagoda accepts that language changes, but some shifts may do more damage than others, and so proposes a two-part test for which changes to arrest: 1) how far along is the change?, and 2) how irreplaceable is the word undergoing the shift? If his math is a little unserious (he just multiplies his two factors), and his data a little dodgy (he simply uses the first 20 Google-search results for his usage corpus), the two questions are pretty good ones.
The first question can, in theory, be answered with a little finer tools than Mr Yagoda's. For example the Google N-Gram Viewer shows that "data" is still used as a plural in most books (works carefully and slowly written and edited). The red line below is the frequency of "the data are", and the blue is the frequency of "the data is."
But "data" is more likely to be singular on the internet as a whole: "the data is" returns 260m pages as a Google Search, "the data are" just 78m. So the vox populi is slowly completing the shift, but we still have an open case in which most careful writers will want to stick with plural data.
What about Mr Yagoda's second question, the "utility rating" of the sense of the word being lost? This obviously doesn't lend itself to easy math. Mr Yagoda gives a 0 to 3 score: "the lion's share" is a cliché he doesn't mind losing, and so gets a 0. "Disinterested" is very interesting to him, so he gives it the maximum 3. I use "disinterested" the way he does, but I don't think it's irreplaceable: "impartial" means nearly the same thing, only with a different etymology ("of no party" rather than "not having a stake"). He wants to keep "to beg the question" to mean "to assume the conclusion". I do too, but unfortunately his Google data show what we all know. Nearly nobody uses it that way any more.
I'm surprised one popular peeve item didn't make his list: "literally". If the storehouse of traditional vocabulary were fire and I could only save a few items, it'd be one of the ones I'd grab on my way out of the building. "Literally" literally has no neat replacement that I know of; if I try to imagine myself replacing it in a sentence, I only imagine myself saying it louder and more insistently.
Me: It was literally miles away.
Interlocutor: [unimpressed] Hm, really?
Me: No, I mean it was literally miles away. We walked forever. Not literally forever, mind you...
When used properly (as in my attempted joke here), "literally" can pack an irreplaceable punch. And while I can't think of how to tabulate it exactly, my sense is that plenty of people still use "literally" to mean "not figuratively", as I do. The fight isn't over yet on literally, as I suspect it is for "beg the question". So I'm for saving the ones we can. I might literally fight this one to my dying day.
Christine Cavalier (@purplecar on Twitter) asks about "adverbial 'all'", as in "She was all mad" and "He was like, bleck, and all". She asked Language Log; Ben Zimmer, it turns out, had posted on "all" + adjective + "-y" ("all Olympic-y", "all judgy") in 2006. But here, a more direct stab at her subject.
First, as usual with this kind of "I've just noticed..." phenomenon, "all" as an adverb is plenty old: the OED lists, for example
(1425) Oryg. Cron. Scotl. (Royal) vi. 493 Hyr chyld-ill al suddanly Travalyd hyr sa angyrly.
and
1793 R. Southey Triumph of Woman 63, in Wks. II. 7 All hopelessly our years of sorrow flow.
I think Ms Cavalier is thinking of a certain teen usage that I've seen myself, but similar usages go back. I can almost hear a bored kid at the mall moaning "My years of sorrow have flowed all hopelessly, you know?" Its meaning doesn't seem to have changed much, but there may be a new lilt to it.
"And all" gets its own sub-entry:
c.and all: and everything else, and everything connected therewith, et cetera; hence, Too, also, as well (especially in dial. speech; Sc. ‘Woo'd an' married an' a'’).
I think that last bit is supposed to be a Scottish example: "Wooed and married and all." Other citations include
a1554 J. Croke tr. Thirteen Psalms (1844) li. 18 The walles, and all, shalbe made newe...
1828 Scott Fair Maid of Perth v, in Chron. Canongate 2nd Ser. I. 133 With smithy, bellows, tongs, anvil, and all.
I'm intrigued by yet another "all". The characters in the wonderfully bizarre web comic Achewood use "all" in a way I haven't seen elswhere. Discussing the pros and cons of a camping trip, hard-living Ray and straight man Roast Beef argue back and forth:
Ray: All laughin' and tellin' lies.
Roast Beef [whose sentences never end in full stops]: All eatin' eggs out of the pan The eggs all not cooked all the way All ashes in the egg.
Ray: All meetin' some ladies! Invitin' 'em to our tent!
Roast Beef: All asleep with tarantulas on my face You all passed out and spoonin' me
Achewood is set in California. I don't know if this kind of "all" is native there, or native only to the strip. Any ideas from readers? The OED doesn't include this kind of "all". (Not yet, at least.)
*American usage, "don't get all hung over him like that".
EVERYONE knows the stereotypes about foreigners speaking English: Scandinavians are shockingly fluent, while the Japanese lag despite years and billions of yen spent trying. Now a big new study confirms some of those stereotypes. But it holds some surprises as well.
EF Education First, an English-teaching company, compiled the biggest ever internationally comparable sample of English learners: some 2m people took identical tests online in 44 countries. The top five performers were Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Finland. The bottom five were Panama, Colombia, Thailand, Turkey and Kazakhstan. Among regions, Latin America fared worst. (No African country had enough takers to make the lists’s threshold for the minimum number of participants.)
This was not a statistically controlled study: the subjects took a free test online and of their own accord. They were by definition connected to the internet and interested in testing their English; they will also be younger and more urban than the population at large. But Philip Hult, the boss of EF, says that his sample shows results similar to a more scientifically controlled but smaller study by the British Council.
Several factors correlate with English ability. Wealthy countries do better overall. But smaller wealthy countries do better still: the larger the number of speakers of a country’s main language, the worse that country tends to be at English. This is one reason Scandinavians do so well: what use is Swedish outside Sweden? It may also explain why Spain was the worst performer in western Europe, and why Latin America was the worst-performing region: Spanish’s role as an international language in a big region dampens incentives to learn English.
Export dependency is another correlate with English. Countries that export more are better at English (though it’s not clear which factor causes which). Malaysia, the best English-performer in Asia, is also the sixth-most export-dependent country in the world. (Singapore was too small to make the list, or it probably would have ranked similarly.) This is perhaps surprising, given a recent trend towards anti-colonial and anti-Western sentiment in Malaysia’s politics. The study’s authors surmise that English has become seen as a mere tool, divorced in many minds from its associations with Britain and America.
Teaching plays a role, too. Starting young, while it seems a good idea, may not pay off: children between eight and 12 learn foreign languages faster than younger ones, so each class hour on English is better spent on a 10-year-old than on a six-year-old. Between 1984 and 2000, the study's authors say, the Netherlands and Denmark began English-teaching between 10 and 12, while Spain and Italy began between eight and 11, with considerably worse results. Mr Hult reckons that poor methods, particularly the rote learning he sees in Japan, can be responsible for poor results despite strenuous efforts. (He would say that, as his company sells English-teaching, but it rings true.)
Finally, one surprising result is that China and India are next to each other (29th and 30th of 44) in the rankings, despite India’s reputation as more Anglophone. Mr Hult says that the Chinese have made a broad push for English (they're "practically obsessed with it”). But efforts like this take time to marinade through entire economies, and so may have avoided notice by outsiders. India, by contrast, has long had well-known Anglophone elites, but this is a narrow slice of the population in a country considerably poorer and less educated than China. English has helped India out-compete China in services, while China has excelled in manufacturing. But if China keeps up the push for English, the subcontinental neighbour's advantage may not last.
As I have grown older I find myself in situations where some of the slang being thrown around has become alien to me. A big part of this might be the fact that I refused to ever play WOW (World of Warcraft) and a lot of new slang has spawned (pun intended) from that game. My refusal to ever touch the game didn’t come for a dislike for MMORPGs, Fantasy worlds, or video games in general. The reason I did not want to partake in WOW was the great number of friends I had that did play and ceased to exist in reality with the rest of us. They stopped coming to real life RPG sessions like Dungeons and Dragons or Vampire because they preferred the online experience. There’s nothing wrong with that, to each their own- but I would rather play a RPG with real people in front of me than go online. The addiction factor is why I stayed away, because I am prone to such things! That said, I find myself playing tabletop RPGs with many people who are deep into these online games and also a bit younger than I. (I am in my early 30′s, they are in their early 20′s.) They use a lot of lingo I’m not quite familiar with.
I thought it wise to research the modern gaming slang and compile a list for those of you like I, who know nothing about how “Pro” this is, or how to cheer “w00t!” when we successfully accomplish a goal as a team. Here it is, your list of modern day computer and gaming slang!
MODERN DAY SLANG FOR DUMMIES:
RL = Real Life (The world that we humans live and exist in, not the internet or gaming world.)
BRB = Be Right Back
AFK = Away From Keyboard
BIO = Biological (Bathroom break)
ATM = At The Moment
OTW = On The Way
BTW = By The Way
TTYL = Talk To You Later
TYT = Take Your Time
NVM = Nevermind
TY = Thank You
YW = You’re Welcome
WB = Welcome Back
NP = No Problem
TYVM = Thank You Very Much
BBL = Be Back Later
LOL = Laugh Out Loud (In most cases those who wield this word are simply smiling in RL, not laughing.)
ROFL = Roll On Floor Laughing (In this case most likely the person is actually laughing out loud in RL.)
ROFLMAO = Roll On Floor Laughing My Ass Off (This means the person is laughing pretty hard in RL and most likely drawing the attention of other gamers in the room who ask “What’s so funny?”)
LMFAO = Laugh My Fat Ass Off (Variations of the above acronym could also include LMTAO – Laugh My Thin Ass Off, or LMAAO – Laugh My Average Ass Off depending on the person’s weight category either in the game or RL.)
W00t! = This is a cheer to signify an accomplishment. Usually used when with another person in the game or with a group.
WOOT! = This is a BIG cheer to signify a LARGE group accomplishment such as defeating a dragon or scoring a huge amount of loot!
FTW! = For The Win! (Signifying who will be the “winner” or an enthusiastic emphasis to the end of a comment, message, or post. Sometimes genuine, but often sarcastic.)
WOW = World of Warcraft (The most popular online game ever created. This game actually is a real life addiction for many people!)
Noob = A “newbie”, someone who is NEW to a game or particular situation.
MMORPG = Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (A game where hundreds, thousands, or millions of players log onto a game in a virtual world to explore, adventure, defeat enemies, and socialize with each other. Online games were first called MUDs Multi User Domain before graphic capability came along.) Ed- Before MUDs most “gamers” played tabletop Role-Playing games using books and paper and rolling dice, many still do (such as myself!).
ding! = An exclamation used by noobs on a MMORPG when they level up, most commonly in WOW. The world refers to a sound emitted from the speakers in WOW when you level up. This slang is used often by noobs, but used sparingly by long time players when they achieve a significant level such as 70 or 80 in which case they often post to their entire guild. A guild is a group of other players on the game which work as a team to overcome obstacles and gain notoriety.
WTG = Way to go!
OMG = “Oh my goodness”, “Oh my God, or “Oh my gosh”.
Gratz = Congratulations
leet or leetspeak = Combining words and numbers, this is often used to make easy to remember codes for WIFI (Wireless Internet Router connections) or simply for any online password. For example instead of “Password” one might type “Pa$$w0rd”. Another example is “I like to eat Spaghetti” and would translate into leet as “I l1ke 2 E@t $paghett!”.
? = What are you talking about?
??? = What the hell is that supposed to mean?
????? = Who the hell do you think you are? How dare you?
STFU = Shut the #%$# Up!
JK = Just Kidding
IAMF = It’s All My Fault
There are many more bits of slang to learn, but if you are a “noob” we will wait awhile and give you some time to absorb all of the above. I’ll add some more entries to this post as time goes on, or you are welcome to post a comment below and add your own.
I’m sure many of us X, Y, & Z generation kids are guilty of sending a text to someone in the same room or only a room away. As the years roll by, it will be interesting to see if the entire english language is eventually condensed down to acronyms which are used in everyday speaking. Will the world soon see oral communication so taxing that we will no longer speak with each other, but simply send text messages?
Let’s see if we “old timers” can keep up with all this new slang and the changing tides!
2010: Kinetic Event - Pentagon term for violent attacks on troops in Afghanistan.
2006: Waterboarding - an interrogation technique in which the subject is immobilized and doused with water to simulate drowning; reported to be used by U.S. interrogators against terrorism detainees.
2005: Internal Nutrition - force-feeding a prisoner.
2004: Badly Sourced - False.
2003: Pre-emptive Self-Defense - attack before a possible attack on oneself.
2001: Daisy Cutter - large bomb that explodes a few feet above the ground. Massacres everything in its path which resembles a daisy.
2000: Courtesy Call - an uninvited call from a telemarketer.
1998: Senior moment - momentary lapse of memory due to age.
1996: Urban Camping - living homeless in a city; Food Insecure - a country where people are starving
Source: American Dialect Society - Word of the Year 2010
For me, it is a cause of some upset that more Anglophones don’t enjoy language. Music is enjoyable it seems, so are dance and other, athletic forms of movement. People seem to be able to find sensual and sensuous pleasure in almost anything but words these days. Words, it seems belong to other people, anyone who expresses themselves with originality, delight and verbal freshness is more likely to be mocked, distrusted or disliked than welcomed. The free and happy use of words appears to be considered elitist or pretentious. Sadly, desperately sadly, the only people who seem to bother with language in public today bother with it in quite the wrong way.
They write letters to broadcasters and newspapers in which they are rude and haughty about other people’s usage and in which they show off their own superior ‘knowledge’ of how language should be. I hate that, and I particularly hate the fact that so many of these pedants assume that I’m on their side. When asked to join in a “let’s persuade this supermarket chain to get rid of their ‘five items or less’ sign” I never join in. Yes, I am aware of the technical distinction between ‘less’ and ‘fewer’, and between ‘uninterested’ and ‘disinterested’ and ‘infer’ and ‘imply’, but none of these are of importance to me. ‘None of these are of importance,’ I wrote there, you’ll notice – the old pedantic me would have insisted on “none of them is of importance”.
Well I’m glad to say I’ve outgrown that silly approach to language. Oscar Wilde, and there have been few greater and more complete lords of language in the past thousand years, once included with a manuscript he was delivering to his publishers a compliment slip in which he had scribbled the injunction: “I’ll leave you to tidy up the woulds and shoulds, wills and shalls, thats and whiches &c.” Which gives us all encouragement to feel less guilty, don’t you think?
There are all kinds of pedants around with more time to read and imitate Lynne Truss and John Humphrys than to write poems, love-letters, novels and stories it seems. They whip out their Sharpies and take away and add apostrophes from public signs, shake their heads at prepositions which end sentences and mutter at split infinitives and misspellings, but do they bubble and froth and slobber and cream with joy at language? Do they ever let the tripping of the tips of their tongues against the tops of their teeth transport them to giddy euphoric bliss? Do they ever yoke impossible words together for the sound-sex of it? Do they use language to seduce, charm, excite, please, affirm and tickle those they talk to? Do they? I doubt it.
They’re too farting busy sneering at a greengrocer’s less than perfect use of the apostrophe. Well sod them to Hades. They think they’re guardians of language. They’re no more guardians of language than the Kennel Club is the guardian of dogkind.
The worst of this sorry bunch of semi-educated losers are those who seem to glory in being irritated by nouns becoming verbs. How dense and deaf to language development do you have to be? If you don’t like nouns becoming verbs, then for heaven’s sake avoid Shakespeare who made a doing-word out of a thing-word every chance he got.
He TABLED the motion and CHAIRED the meeting in which nouns were made verbs. New examples from our time might take some getting used to: ‘He actioned it that day’ for instance might strike some as a verbing too far, but we have been sanctioning, envisioning, propositioning and stationing for a long time, so why not ‘action’? ‘Because it’s ugly,’ whinge the pedants. It’s only ugly because it’s new and you don’t like it. Ugly in the way Picasso, Stravinsky and Eliot were once thought ugly and before them Monet, Mahler and Baudelaire. Pedants will also claim, with what I am sure is eye-popping insincerity and shameless disingenuousness, that their fight is only for ‘clarity’.
This is all very well, but there is no doubt what ‘Five items or less’ means, just as only a dolt can’t tell from the context and from the age and education of the speaker, whether ‘disinterested’ is used in the ‘proper’ sense of non-partisan, or in the ‘improper’ sense of uninterested. No, the claim to be defending language for the sake of clarity almost never, ever holds water. Nor does the idea that following grammatical rules in language demonstrates clarity of thought and intelligence of mind. Having said this, I admit that if you want to communicate well for the sake of passing an exam or job interview, then it is obvious that wildly original and excessively heterodox language could land you in the soup.
I think what offends examiners and employers when confronted with extremely informal, unpunctuated and haywire language is the implication of not caring that underlies it. You slip into a suit for an interview and you dress your language up too. You can wear what you like linguistically or sartorially when you’re at home or with friends, but most people accept the need to smarten up under some circumstances – it’s only considerate. But that is an issue of fitness, of suitability, it has nothing to do with correctness. There no right language or wrong language any more than are right or wrong clothes. Context, convention and circumstance are all.
And so we come to the end of our United Kingdom English focus. Rowan Sawday (Dizraeli), who kicked everything off with his 21st Century Flux rap, wraps the month up with a post in answer to the question: What’s your English? Thank you to all guest authors – English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh– for interesting, entertaining and conversation-generating contributions. See you on the other side of the weekend and the start of Brazil English for February.
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I realised my love for English when I moved to France. I was 21, in a new place, where every detail of my day had to be conducted in a language not my own, and I saw for the first time how much we are shaped by the words we speak. A French version of me began to form, and I found that my thoughts and feelings were funnelled in new ways. Living in twangy Southern French (the accent of Montpellier, where I stayed, is a million miles from the phlegmy gutterance of the North), I found a bounce and expressiveness in my attitude that was different from English. I gestured more when I spoke; I furrowed my brow in the Southern sun. I enjoyed it.
But there was something missing. For all its poetry and detail, the French language – for me – lacked one vital element: the word silly. This might seem a small thing, but the word sillyis one of the most important in the English language. Strung between its two syllables is a universe of humour, playfulness, surreal possibility and rubber meanings. Birthed from the Old English root sǣliġ, meaning ‘blessed’, and growing through the muddled seely, meaning ‘innocent’, ‘poor’, ‘foolish’ and ‘fortunate’ all at once, silly encapsulates what to me is the most appropriate response to the mess of contradictions that is reality: fling off your clothes, and mud wrestle. Playing the role of Fool in the court of the king, it can also create a space for very serious satire and social commentary. Monty Python – the British comedy collective – took on fascism, the corruption of religion, the class system, bureaucracy … all the poisons of the modern world, and did so armed only with colossal silliness.
In Montpellier, I felt disarmed without silly: I sought out replacement words, finding a few that sidled in the same direction (the phrase n’importe quoi, for example, meaning ‘it doesn’t matter what’) but none that came close.
Returning to England after my year away, I dived headfirst back into my mother tongue, relishing its words with many meanings, and its meanings with many possible words. It struck me that the non-sense of English as an entire system could be summarised as silly, and I loved that fact: here was a language I could twist, jumble and reinvent. Because of the history of English, which began as a Germanic import and developed through colonisation, mutation, corruption and downright theft into a hybrid monster with a thousand tongues, it is – I think – uniquely flexible and playful.
Of course, I’m a native speaker: the language through which you grasp your first understandings will always be the one which gives you the most scope for expression, and English is by no means the only language capable of playfulness and multiplicity. I have heard French rappers and poets juggle their language in the most breathtaking ways. And I’m sure that, for a person coming to it from another language, English is full of gaping holes. A native Boro speaker from Northeastern India, for instance, might be astonished that we have no equivalent word for mokhrob, meaning ‘to express anger by a sideways glance’.
But poor foolish fortunate that I am, I love English, holes and all. As someone who works with words for a living, it’s a messy, colourful joy. And most of all, it’s a version of me with space for silly.
Calloo callay!
(Boro reference borrowed from Spoken Here, by Mark Abley (Arrow Books, 2003))
What a great way to end the year with an Edublog award; thanks so much to those who voted for us. As for 2010, we have some great things planned and can’t wait to share them with you. As well as more witty, entertaining, discussion-inducing fare a la 2009, this year we will really be focusing on English as a growing, changing global language. Every month we’ll look at a different country in the world and the English that is spoken there. We’ll be asking the question: what’s your English?
So, we’re going to start close to home: January is British English month. It’s a tough one to cover as there are so many different kinds of English spoken in Britain and, for sure, we won’t get even a fraction of the wonderful diversity in – but we have to start somewhere! To introduce the theme for the year and the kind of thoughts that go with it, here is a local hip hop artist/musician/poet and all-round insightful guy: Dizraeli and a piece he has made and we have recorded about … well… English.
It’s fast and the English might seem ‘foreign’ to some of you, but we’ve added the transcript below the video, and for teachers and students of English language learning we are putting together some worksheets that you can use to pick the poetry apart!
Please check back for more British English posts, and feel free to write your own posts about your brand of British English or your experience of British English (any variation thereof) and if we can, we will post it up here.
Happy 2010! Here’s to a year of celebrating language!
The 21st Century Flux
English. The new disease?
It pours out of television speakers and computer screens
Disregarding Babel with its very cocky fluency
Sticking on its labellings at every opportunity.
Nothing’s safe; it won’t stop when it begins to spread
it dominates the airwaves and reigns/rains on the internet
leaving cultures altered and confused as to what’s what
turns the dialecting of the youths to a hotch-potch
rag-tag scrabble bag; everyone’s affected
the little languages will not survive unprotected.
So hold your own, but get a firm hold of English
and every last one of us shall be a multilinguist:
sing it!
Shampoo juggernaut moolah hullabaloo
ad infinitum, pow-wow, kudos, déjà vu
Won ton, billabong, beef, potato, hobo, dream
Wha gwan with the wigwam boogie
mr Chimpanzee?
Welcome to the twenty-first century flux
for now, English is the language of choice
And when it dies, as every tongue eventually must
let it be said you added your voice The professor said, “Pif! What language is this?
Degenerate slang isn’t standard English!
We at the top must establish limits.”
I said “Prof! Language is the people that live it.”Get loose, give it some vision and foresight
and juice; we can fling the dictionary door wide.
I live in a city where it seems like
every single idiom is intermingling stream-like,
Like streams, that know no barriers
No matter what dams and channels are established –
they are irrelevant. What matters is the message that is put across,
and the passion that’s invested in it. Nothing’s lost
it merely mutates, and lets the people speaking it
tweak it in new ways.
Meaning that meaning is whatever you say
Jilly, Jack, Hussain, in Iraq to the UK …
to all corners; through all twists and bends
Six billion personal versions of events
It’s thrilling when you think of all the tongues on a jostle
to express their puzzle in the best words possible.
The more words we have, the more ways we have
to express the world we have to co-exist in.
And if the English language is the lingua franca of this planet,
never say that it should be a closed system.
Welcome to the twenty-first century flux
for now, English is the language of choice for the performers
But when it dies, as every tongue eventually must
let it be said you added your voice to the chorus Cos English isn’t English; it’s an elastic patchwork
A fantastically insane confederation
a very strange tapestry of foreign vernaculars
borrowed from Norse kings, and fettered slavemenSo if language is linked to the land which it springs from
English is linked to the globe in entirety
With fragments of every language you’ll think of
Roots in every type of society:
Welsh, French, Jamaican, Indian, Italian
Dominican, Hispanic, Germanic, Norse, African,
Norman, Dutch, Latin, Greek, Japanese, Yiddish,
Native American, Antipodean and Finnish…
The list could continue till my tongue went blue;
what I’m saying is the owner is you.
It lives as it’s spoken, and it mirrors the truth
And there isn’t any owner but you…
Welcome to the twenty-first century flux
for now, English is the language of choice
But when it dies, as every tongue eventually must
let it be said you added your voice
