Americanisms and British English

Americanisms: 50 of your most noted examples

20 July 2011 Last updated at 01:30 GMT  | Comments (1295)

The Magazine's recent piece on Americanisms entering the language in the UK prompted thousands of you to e-mail examples.

Some are useful, while some seem truly unnecessary, argued Matthew Engel in the article. Here are 50 of the most e-mailed.

1. When people ask for something, I often hear: "Can I get a..." It infuriates me. It's not New York. It's not the 90s. You're not in Central Perk with the rest of the Friends. Really." Steve, Rossendale, Lancashire

2. The next time someone tells you something is the "least worst option", tell them that their most best option is learning grammar. Mike Ayres, Bodmin, Cornwall

3. The phrase I've watched seep into the language (especially with broadcasters) is "two-time" and "three-time". Have the words double, triple etc, been totally lost? Grammatically it makes no sense, and is even worse when spoken. My pulse rises every time I hear or see it. Which is not healthy as it's almost every day now. Argh! D Rochelle, Bath

4. Using 24/7 rather than "24 hours, 7 days a week" or even just plain "all day, every day". Simon Ball, Worcester

5. The one I can't stand is "deplane", meaning to disembark an aircraft, used in the phrase "you will be able to deplane momentarily". TykeIntheHague, Den Haag, Holland

6. To "wait on" instead of "wait for" when you're not a waiter - once read a friend's comment about being in a station waiting on a train. For him, the train had yet to arrive - I would have thought rather that it had got stuck at the station with the friend on board. T Balinski, Raglan, New Zealand

A US reader writes...

JP Spore believes there is nothing wrong with English evolving

Languages are, by their very nature, shifting, malleable things that morph according to the needs and desires of those who speak them.

Mr Engel suggests that British English should be preserved, but it seems to me this both lacks a historical perspective of the language, as well as an ignorance of why it is happening.

English itself is a rather complicated, interesting blend of Germanic, French and Latin (among other things). It has arrived at this point through the long and torturous process of assimilation and modification. The story of the English language is the story of an unstoppable train of consecutive changes - and for someone to put their hand up and say "wait - the train stops here and should go no further" is not only futile, but ludicrously arbitrary.

Why here? Why not stop it 20 years ago? Or 20 years hence? If we're going to just set an arbitrary limit on language change, why not choose the year 1066 AD? The Saxons had some cool words, right?
Mr Engel - and all language Luddites on both sides of the Atlantic, including more than a few here in the States - really need to get over it when their countrymen find more value in non-native words than in their native lexicon.

I understand the argument about loss of cultural identity, but if so many people are so willing to give up traditional forms and phrases maybe we should consider that they didn't have as much value as we previously imagined.

7. "It is what it is". Pity us. Michael Knapp, Chicago, US

8. Dare I even mention the fanny pack? Lisa, Red Deer, Canada

9. "Touch base" - it makes me cringe no end. Chris, UK

10. Is "physicality" a real word? Curtis, US

11. Transportation. What's wrong with transport? Greg Porter, Hercules, CA, US

12. The word I hate to hear is "leverage". Pronounced lev-er-ig rather than lee-ver -ig. It seems to pop up in all aspects of work. And its meaning seems to have changed to "value added". Gareth Wilkins, Leicester

13. Does nobody celebrate a birthday anymore, must we all "turn" 12 or 21 or 40? Even the Duke of Edinburgh was universally described as "turning" 90 last month. When did this begin? I quite like the phrase in itself, but it seems to have obliterated all other ways of speaking about birthdays. Michael McAndrew, Swindon

14. I caught myself saying "shopping cart" instead of shopping trolley today and was thoroughly disgusted with myself. I've never lived nor been to the US either. Graham Nicholson, Glasgow

15. What kind of word is "gotten"? It makes me shudder. Julie Marrs, Warrington

16. "I'm good" for "I'm well". That'll do for a start. Mike, Bridgend, Wales

17. "Bangs" for a fringe of the hair. Philip Hall, Nottingham

18. Take-out rather than takeaway! Simon Ball, Worcester

19. I enjoy Americanisms. I suspect even some Americans use them in a tongue-in-cheek manner? "That statement was the height of ridiculosity". Bob, Edinburgh

20. "A half hour" instead of "half an hour". EJB, Devon

21. A "heads up". For example, as in a business meeting. Lets do a "heads up" on this issue. I have never been sure of the meaning. R Haworth, Marlborough

22. Train station. My teeth are on edge every time I hear it. Who started it? Have they been punished? Chris Capewell, Queens Park, London

23. To put a list into alphabetical order is to "alphabetize it" - horrid! Chris Fackrell, York

24. People that say "my bad" after a mistake. I don't know how anything could be as annoying or lazy as that. Simon Williamson, Lymington, Hampshire

25. "Normalcy" instead of "normality" really irritates me. Tom Gabbutt, Huddersfield

26. As an expat living in New Orleans, it is a very long list but "burglarize" is currently the word that I most dislike. Simon, New Orleans

A US reader writes...

Melanie Johnson - MA student in Applied Linguistics, now in the UK

The idea that there once existed a "pure" form of English is simply untrue. The English spoken in the UK today has been influenced by a number of languages, including Dutch, French and German. Speakers from the time of William the Conqueror would not recognise what we speak in Britain as English. This is because language variation shifts are constantly changing.

Five years ago you might have found it odd if someone asked you to "friend" them, but today many of us know this means to add them on Facebook. The increased use of technology, in combination with the rise of a globalised society, means language changes are happening faster than ever, especially in places with highly diverse populations like London. Young people are usually at the vanguard of this, so it's no surprise to find London teenagers increasingly speaking what's been termed "multicultural ethnic English".

Changes in word use are normal and not unique to any language. But English does enjoy a privileged status as the world's lingua franca. That began with the British, but has been maintained by the Americans. It's difficult to predict how English will next evolve, but the one certainty is it will.

27. "Oftentimes" just makes me shiver with annoyance. Fortunately I've not noticed it over here yet. John, London

28. Eaterie. To use a prevalent phrase, oh my gaad! Alastair, Maidstone (now in Athens, Ohio)

29. I'm a Brit living in New York. The one that always gets me is the American need to use the word bi-weekly when fortnightly would suffice just fine. Ami Grewal, New York

30. I hate "alternate" for "alternative". I don't like this as they are two distinct words, both have distinct meanings and it's useful to have both. Using alternate for alternative deprives us of a word. Catherine, London

31. "Hike" a price. Does that mean people who do that are hikers? No, hikers are ramblers! M Holloway, Accrington

32. Going forward? If I do I shall collide with my keyboard. Ric Allen, Matlock

33. I hate the word "deliverable". Used by management consultants for something that they will "deliver" instead of a report. Joseph Wall, Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire

34. The most annoying Americanism is "a million and a half" when it is clearly one and a half million! A million and a half is 1,000,000.5 where one and a half million is 1,500,000. Gordon Brown, Coventry

35. "Reach out to" when the correct word is "ask". For example: "I will reach out to Kevin and let you know if that timing is convenient". Reach out? Is Kevin stuck in quicksand? Is he teetering on the edge of a cliff? Can't we just ask him? Nerina, London

36. Surely the most irritating is: "You do the Math." Math? It's MATHS. Michael Zealey, London

37. I hate the fact I now have to order a "regular Americano". What ever happened to a medium sized coffee? Marcus Edwards, Hurst Green

38. My worst horror is expiration, as in "expiration date". Whatever happened to expiry? Christina Vakomies, London

39. My favourite one was where Americans claimed their family were "Scotch-Irish". This of course it totally inaccurate, as even if it were possible, it would be "Scots" not "Scotch", which as I pointed out is a drink. James, Somerset

40.I am increasingly hearing the phrase "that'll learn you" - when the English (and more correct) version was always "that'll teach you". What a ridiculous phrase! Tabitha, London

41. I really hate the phrase: "Where's it at?" This is not more efficient or informative than "where is it?" It just sounds grotesque and is immensely irritating. Adam, London

42. Period instead of full stop. Stuart Oliver, Sunderland

43. My pet hate is "winningest", used in the context "Michael Schumacher is the winningest driver of all time". I can feel the rage rising even using it here. Gayle, Nottingham

44. My brother now uses the term "season" for a TV series. Hideous. D Henderson, Edinburgh

45. Having an "issue" instead of a "problem". John, Leicester

46. I hear more and more people pronouncing the letter Z as "zee". Not happy about it! Ross, London

47. To "medal" instead of to win a medal. Sets my teeth on edge with a vengeance. Helen, Martock, Somerset

48. "I got it for free" is a pet hate. You got it "free" not "for free". You don't get something cheap and say you got it "for cheap" do you? Mark Jones, Plymouth

49. "Turn that off already". Oh dear. Darren, Munich

50. "I could care less" instead of "I couldn't care less" has to be the worst. Opposite meaning of what they're trying to say. Jonathan, Birmingham

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14201796

SE - poor grammar disrupts flow of discourse

By Barbara Gunn

Special to the Oak Ridger

Posted Jun 22, 2011 @ 07:24 PM

Is English, as we know it, dead?

    Yes, according to Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten.
"The end came quietly when a reader castigated the newspaper for having written that Sasha Obama was the youngest daughter of the president and first lady rather than the younger daughter. The letter writer called the first couple the 'Obama's.' This constituted an illiterate proofreading of an illiterate criticism of an illiteracy ..." and, Weingarten concluded, "English, already severely weakened, died of shame."

    Not so fast, Mr. Weingarten. Maybe the patient can be revived. Who cares, except maybe a few newspaper columnists, former teachers of grammar, and those few copy editors who are still employed? Others may have some lingering memories of the differences between contractions and plurals, agreement of subject and verb, misplaced modifiers, dangling participles, and even, ugh, a teacher who insisted on diagramming sentences and perhaps something called "parsing." Those teachers red-penciled every spelling, punctuation, and usage error when it was quite clear what you meant. Who needs that?

    Some probably thought "spell check" would save English. It might have saved Sarah Palin some backtracking had she checked "refudiate" and been able to choose "repudiate" or "refuse" or George W. Bush with "fundamentaries" or "educationalizing."

    A different type of error occurred when spell check failed to stop a newsletter of mine stating a publication was not available when it should have stated it was now available.

 Spell check allows some amusing errors. Who would want to spoil the fun of discovering "spade" female cats are for sale or that men now have a choice of treatments for "prostrate" cancer?

    Newspapers have had to cut back on expenses for copy editors, but one would think Oprah could afford the best. Yet, consider this sentence from one of her news releases: "The audience was made up of some of who the programs called its most loyal viewers." A copy editor might change "who" to "whom" but would probably reword the sentence to read: "The audience was made up of some of the program's most loyal viewers."

    There is another poorly written sentence in Dr. Phil's column in the November 2010 Oprah magazine: "Explain to your mother that you will continue to provide the highest-quality care you can afford her with." Rewritten, this would be "Explain to your mother that you will continue to provide her with the highest quality care you can afford."

    The Oprah examples are not only ungrammatical, they stop the flow of the passage, forcing the reader to pause and think, "How was that again?"
    Some more errors someone someplace should have corrected:

"The fact of the matter is..." (White House spokesman), a redundancy similar to Judge Judy's pet peeve, "Basically."

"For Michele and I..." (President Obama), a compound object of the preposition; thus, "for Michele and for me."

"Two pair of eyeglasses" (Vision World), pair is singular; "one pair, two pairs."

"Lots of tension between Simon and I" (Ellen DeGeneres), compound object of preposition; thus, "between Simon and me."

    Those of us who bemoan grammatical errors and awkward sentences may not save English, but maybe another group will: employers.

    An employer might overlook or not recognize some of the fine points of grammar that annoy columnists and teachers, but why take that chance?

Barbara Gunn is an Oak Ridge resident and frequent columnist.

Source: http://www.oakridger.com/columnists/x898078904/Can-English-be-resuscitated

Simon Heffer - Prescriptivism: Tabloid Exaggeration

Strictly English by Simon Heffer: Part Three

In the third of four extracts from his book instructing us on correct written English, Simon Heffer tackles the language of tabloid exaggeration

By Simon Heffer

4:33PM BST 02 Sep 2010

The language of tabloid exaggeration is apparent on every page of what the trade calls the “red-top” newspapers. Prices soar, and then they crash. In politics, rows about issues are always erupting, and they are inevitably furious. The key participants in them clash, and they evince rage. The consequence of an outrage is that there will be a probe, leading up to a damning report. Its shock findings will be followed by a clampdown (or a crackdown). The opponents of the transgressors will slam their behaviour and seek to topple them.

Any death, especially of a teen, is a tragedy, and if more than one person dies it is a catastrophe. It leaves grieving loved ones gutted. Should the victim be a young girl, she was bubbly, especially if blonde. Young men, unless proven criminals, had in their lives had huge respect from their mates.

On the sport pages, managers of soccer teams vow that their sides will do better, knowing they risk being axed if they do not. Should a team suddenly become brilliant it will be because a star player has shown he is a hero, and can expect a hike in his wages. He may then launch a new career as a fashion icon. Should the team crash to defeat in a cup final, all its fans would be devastated.

Celebs will usually have amazing lifestyles that are revealed by the tabloid press as a series of stunning events. These will often be fuelled by champagne and sometimes by drugs. They entail living in a million-pound home, but also possibly sharing a love nest with a stunner and, as the paper will reveal, a love child as a result of extensive cheating on a spouse. The wronged woman (for it usually is a woman) will be brave during her ordeal: until it emerges that she has had a toyboy too, with whom there have been nights of nookie.

Some of the italicised words are pure slang and have no place in respectable writing – celebs and nookie, for example. Others come under the heading of coy or vulgar euphemism – toyboy, love child, love nest, cheating and stunner are what might more directly be called gigolo, illegitimate child, flat, committing adultery and mistress.

Some are simply failures of terminology: those who ride horses go riding, not horse riding; and those who shoot or hunt practise field sports. Blood sports is a politically loaded term popularised by opponents of field sports, and often used unwittingly by newspapers that have no editorial objection to them.

The main objection to most of the tabloid language highlighted above is that it devalues the currency. If somebody is devastated because his football team has lost a match, how does he feel when he gets home and finds his wife and children have been killed in a fire? If a woman is brave because of her reaction to the way in which her philandering husband embarrasses her publicly, how are we to describe her if she endures with courage and fortitude a horrible and potentially fatal illness? How can the ordeal of one experience compare with that of the other?

If one death, however sad for those concerned, is a tragedy, how does one describe the moral effect of a plane crash in which 400 people are killed? If a man who scores a goal is a hero, what term do we reserve to describe one who wins the Victoria Cross? If an MP suffers shame because he claims for a food mixer improperly on his expenses, what does he suffer if he is convicted of a criminal offence? If he is disgraced for being found in bed with someone else’s wife, what adjective do we use of him if he is found to have perpetrated a systematic fraud, or is convicted of paedophilia?

Above all, if unexceptional facts (often supplied to the newspaper by a celebrity’s public relations adviser) are described as having been revealed when, in fact, all they have been is disclosed, what verb is to be used for something that is a genuine revelation?

Other words have become clichés and are therefore meaningless. Little weight is carried now by the metaphorical use of verbs such as soar, crash, launch, emerge, fuel and clash. Nouns like toff, fat cat, clampdown and icon are just lazy labels for people or for abstract activities; so too are phrases such as damning report and shock finding.

Respect (huge or otherwise) in this context is an absurdity. It has become a word used in urban argot to describe not a feeling of reverence by one for another, but what a self-regarding person who has watched too many gangster films imagines is the estimation in which he should be held by others.

* Strictly English: the Correct Way to Write… and Why It Matters by Simon Heffer (Random House, £12.99 t £11.99) is published on Sept 9

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/7978041/Strictly-English-by-Simon-Heffer-Part-Three.html

Simon Heffer - Prescriptivism at its finest and saddest: Common Mistakes

Strictly English: Part one

The first of four exclusive extracts from ‘Strictly English: the Correct Way to Write... and Why It Matters’ points out some common mistakes

Simon Heffer: 'It is perhaps unfortunate, but we judge people often by how they speak or write' 

By Simon Heffer

4:42PM BST 20 Aug 2010

Even when armed with fine intentions, one can still fall into traps: for many words do not mean what one thinks they mean. In the interests of accuracy and precision, what follows is a reminder of the true meaning of some commonly misused words.

One occasionally reads in newspapers about people who have died or been injured in a car that has collided with a tree. This is remarkable, because a collision requires both parties to it to be in motion. The Latin verb collidere means to strike or clash together, and the etymology is strict. So two moving vehicles may collide, as may a car and a cyclist or even a car and a pedestrian, but not a car and a tree. Like so much of our language this is a question of logic based on the etymology; there is no perversity about it.

One should take care in using the verb contradict. For there to be a contradiction there has to be a statement, for a contradiction is a categorical statement in opposition to another. If one person says “the dog is black” when it is obvious that the beast is white, then to affirm its whiteness is a contradiction; and one may say: “I contradicted his assertion that the dog was black.” However, if what one is taking issue with is not a statement, but a suggestion, or advice, or a conjecture, then one does not strictly contradict it: one rejects it, disputes it, contests it, ignores it, doubts it.

Another word that people insist on wrenching from its correct etymology is decimate. As every schoolboy knows, this was a punishment meted out to Roman legions, in which every 10th man was killed. Its correct sense in English, therefore, is the reduction of the strength of a body of people by 10 per cent. It does not mean more or less than that, though it is often used to describe the near elimination of a contingent, and has been wrongly used now for more than 100 years. The greatest absurdity of all is a statement such as “the workforce was decimated by 20 per cent”, followed closely by “the town was decimated completely”.

In his speech in Chicago in 2008 on the night he won the United States presidential election, Barack Obama spoke of the enormity of the task ahead of him.

I am unclear whether this is now accepted American usage to describe something that is enormous. The word is used in such a fashion here, and appears to be one of those whose wrong usage has been accepted by some dictionaries (though not by the OED). An enormity, in its first current usage given by the dictionary, is a “deviation from moral or legal rectitude”: though it does concede that, influenced by enormous, it can mean “extreme or monstrous wickedness”. So an enormity is something bad, a transgression: it is not simply something big. One should speak not of the enormity of the task, but of its enormousness: even if one is President of the United States.

Educated writers will use the phrase “a fraction of the cost went towards overheads” without thinking of its logic.

What such writers inevitably mean is a small fraction, which although still vague is a perfectly acceptable statement. However, they forget that nine tenths is also a fraction, and so to use the noun without qualifying it with an adjective is almost meaningless.

Part of the problem with the interference of the state in our lives, and the apparent ubiquity of its bureaucrats, is that many of us find ourselves using – or misusing – the jargon of officials in our everyday language.

We use the word inquiry when we mean question or query. An inquiry is really a formal investigation, usually conducted by a judge or senior official into some aspect of government activity or something for which the state has ultimate responsibility.

Individuals should not say that they have an inquiry; they have a question, or a query.

Literally is one of the more abused words in our tongue. Should you find yourself about to write it, pause and consider whether it is really necessary; it almost never is. One hears people say “he literally jumped out of his skin”, when we all know full well he did nothing of the sort. Yet literally, according to the dictionary in this sense, means “with exact fidelity of representation”. One cannot say “he literally died” unless he is dead, and died as a result of the event being described; but people do say it when “he” still lives and breathes.

To make matters worse, circumstances in which one could use the adverb accurately would almost always render its use tautological. If one has fallen down the stairs, nothing is added to the statement “I fell down the stairs” by extending it to “I literally fell down the stairs”.

So avoid this usually pointless, and often silly, word.

*Next week: Why jargon is ruining the language

Strictly English: the Correct Way to Write… and Why It Matters
by Simon Heffer (Random House, £12.99 T £11.99) is published on September 9

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/7956023/Strictly-English-Part-one.html

Simon Heffer - Prescriptivism: Jargon

Strictly English: Part Two

In the second of four extracts from his book instructing us on the correct way to write English, Simon Heffer takes on contemporary jargon

By Simon Heffer

5:40PM BST 27 Aug 2010

Some groups of people – state officials, academics, lawyers, certain breeds of scientist – talk to each other in a private language. Some official documents make little sense to lay people because they have to be couched in an argot that combines avoidance of the politically incorrect with obeisance to the contemporary jargon of the profession. Some articles written by academics in particular are almost incomprehensible to those outside their circle. This is not because the outsiders are stupid. It is because the academics feel they have to write in a certain stilted, dense way in order to be taken seriously by their peers.

Many officials seem to have lost the knack of communicating with people outside their closed world. Some academics, however, are bilingual. If asked to write for a publication outside the circle – such as a newspaper – they can rediscover the knack of writing reasonably plain English. They do not indulge themselves in such a fashion when they write for learned journals.

There are certain phrases that they feel obliged to use: positing a thesis always goes down well, for example, where most of us would simply assert or argue or, in a radical move, say. One example of this will suffice to make the point. It is from an American psychology journal:

"Human behaviour is a product both of our innate human nature and of our individual experience and environment. In this article, however, we emphasise biological influences on human behaviour, because most social scientists explain human behaviour as if evolution stops at the neck and as if our behaviour is a product almost entirely of environment and socialisation. In contrast, evolutionary psychologists see human nature as a collection of psychological adaptations that often operate beneath conscious thinking to solve problems of survival and reproduction by predisposing us to think or feel in certain ways."

It is almost as though the purpose of such writing is not to be clear: that the writer is recording research in order to prove to peers or superiors that he has discovered something.

It does not seem to bother such people that their style is considered ugly and barbaric by anyone of discernment. It is repetitious, long-winded, abstract and abstruse. Those who write in such a way probably will not easily be discouraged, unless the prevailing standards of their disciplines change.

What is important is that others do not think it is somehow clever to emulate them. Academia – however clever its inhabitants are supposed to be – seems the constituency most resistant to the notion of clarity being the most desirable aspect of writing. The example above is not unusual or extreme. Its long words, scarcity of punctuation, abundance of abstracts and even the odd tautology (“innate human nature”) suggest to me that little care was taken in trying to communicate what we must be sure are important ideas. Were I the sub-editor on whose desk this piece of prose landed, and it was my job to turn it into comprehensible English, I should need a stiff drink and a lie down before even trying.

This obscurity is not a vice confined to academics. Creative types tend to have their own languages too, which add to the aura of pretentiousness and self-regard that such people are reputed to have around them. I found the following on the website of Daniel Libeskind, the celebrated architect, about his designs to extend the Military History Museum in Dresden: “The wedge cuts through the structural order of the arsenal, giving the museum a place for reflection about organised conflict and violence. This creates an objective view to the continuity of military conflicts and opens up vistas to central anthropological questioning.”

Few people will have any idea what much of that means. The ideal style is one comprehensible to any intelligent person. If you make a conscious decision to communicate with a select group, so be it: but in trying to appeal to a large audience, or even a small one that you wish to be sure will understand your meaning, writing of the sort exemplified here will not do. This sort of writing used to be kept from the general public thanks to the need to find someone to publish it. The advent of the internet means that one is no longer so shielded from its pernicious effects as one used to be; and such accessibility and ubiquity threaten to have a pervasive effect on the soundness of the language and its susceptibility to corruption.

Next week: the dangerous language of tabloid exaggeration

Strictly English: the Correct Way to Write… and Why It Matters by Simon Heffer (Random House, £12.99 T £11.99) is published on September 9

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/7966297/Strictly-English-Part-Two.html

Removing Grammar from School = Crime - Norman Tebbit

In 1985 Norman Tebbit suggested in all seriousness that the abandonment of traditional grammar-teaching in schools had contributed to the breakdown of law and order.

"If you allow standards to slip to the stage where good English is no better than bad English, [it] tends to cause people to have no standards at all, and once you lose standards there's no imperative to stay out of crime."

Standard English = Success

Kevin Myers: Omigod, this linguistic gibberish is, like, so gross

By Kevin Myers

Friday June 03 2011

There was a single, telling moment when Michelle Obama spoke to a group of inner-city London schoolgirls the other day: she said they must work hard to be different "from other girls".

She didn't say "than other girls", the common and lazy usage into which many people have slipped. She correctly used the preposition rather than the relative conjunction, which -- for example -- the comparative adverb "better" would have attracted: hence, "different from" and "better than".

And she did that because she understood the rules of grammar. Two generations after the civil rights movement, and slightly less after the professional emancipation of women, black American women like Michelle Obama and Condoleezza Rice show how it's done.

Success is terribly simple: it comes from hard work, hard work and more hard work. There is no easy route. And the very first step is the basic step, of learning to speak properly, using grammatically correct speech, constructed from sentences that can be parsed and analysed.

You can bet that the young Michelle and young Condoleezza were taught just that from the age of 11 onwards -- argot, repressed; slang, outlawed; patois, abolished; ghetto-talk, taboo. Speak sentences that President Lincoln could understand, and you cannot go far wrong.

Gentle reader, before the summer term ends, and schools close for another entire meteorological season, ride the Dundrum Luas or the Dun Laoghaire Dart in the mid-afternoon and listen to the "I'm like" babble of today's schoolgirls, for whom 'Sex and the City' is not a faintly mordant sexual satire with gay jokes and subversive word-games, but a social template, a blueprint, an aspiration, and a language role-model.

This is like using 'Dad's Army' as the basis for a military academy, or '30 Rock' as an example of how to run a TV station.

Who in Irish schools understands grammar any more? Does any teacher correct a pupil who says "different than"? Do teachers even have the temerity to stop their pupils speaking in the gruesome American lilt that is now almost the received-dialect of the old Protestant schools of Dublin?

The largely anglicised and hateful Dort accent of 20 years ago, which followed the line of the suburban railway track from Dun Laoghaire to Howth like hogweed, and which turned all "ar" sounds into "or" has gone. It has been replaced by this ghastly transatlantic mishmash of badly-learnt phrases, which is no less absurd than South Sea Isla-nders trying to copy Elvis.

The truth is that educated Americans simply don't talk like the television representations of them. Their conversations don't consist of an endless series of declarations of, "I'm like", followed by a brief facial imitation of some sort of mood or attitude. They mostly compose their sentences grammatically and carefully, a legacy of the Germanic-style high schools which make the US so very Teutonic in culture.

But of course, television -- the inspiration for the blatherings of the "I'm like" generation -- barely touches upon that mundane reality of the quotidian. Why should it? It's merely entertainment in the US; but tragically in Ireland, it has become the great cultural inspiration.

How did the old Protestant schools of Dublin become a factory for a pseudo-American language, as spoken so gruesomely by Jedward? Listen to the real speech of Condoleezza and Michelle. It does not follow the infuriating upward intonation of the phoney-interrogative, it is always measured and correctly constructed, and it is entirely without the conversational tropes of 'Friends' and 'Sex and the City', which are meant to be little in-jokes, not syntactical language-guides.

It is now the norm for the English-speaking world to adopt American words and usages: even Australians, quite unbearably, now say "guys" instead of "blokes", which was once one of the great talismanic terms of Strine. Equally, Irish rugby players never say "lads" any more: no, it's all "guys guys guys". And though I find it all hateful, I know such word-transferences are probably both inevitable and unstoppable.

However, what's happening in middle-class Irish schools is unique. An entire social class is doing more than picking up words: it is changing its complete speech patterns -- its melody, its emphases, its grammar and its narrative style -- to conform with what it perceives to be American. But it's not authentic American, but a bad copy of what was originally a parody anyway.

Look, if you do insist on learning from America, then let it be a model from the best of the US, and not from some grisly TV fant-asy: from Harvard, MIT, Yale, Cornell, William and Mary, Michigan State, Stan-ford, UCLA, Annapolis, West Point and Quantico. That USA is really worth copying.

You can be sure of one thing -- if Condoleezza or Michelle were head teachers in the middle-class schools of Dublin, they'd put a halt to the plague of linguistic gibberish in a single morning's assembly. It's not too late, even now: all that's required to reverse these revolting trends is the cultural self-confidence to defend Irish ways of speaking, and to ridicule the utterly ridiculous -- I'm like, Omigod, no WAY, shut up! that is so toadally gross.

- Kevin Myers

Irish Independent

Source: http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/kevin-myers/kevin-myers-omigod-this-linguistic-gibberish-is-like-so-gross-2665049.html

Teens ruining the english language? Please.

Many people have argued that the current generation (Gen Y) is ruining and degrading the English Language with texting and e-speak which deviates from the spelling and grammatical standards.

Of course, such notions are not true. in 1712, the great Jonathan Swift wrote that the English Language is beyond repair and suggested that there be an "Academie Anglaise" like the current "Academie Francaise" which would regulate and ultimately "save" the English Language.

300 years later and the language is not only surviving, but thriving.

"bogus grammatical rules"

A foolish consistency

Posted by Stan Carey on September 28, 2011

No doubt you’re familiar with the following line from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay on self-reliance: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”. In a comment to my recent post about hopefully, Marc Leavitt quoted it in relation to the strange persistence of outdated and unfounded rules of grammar and usage.

Most people know the kind of bogus grammar rules I mean: Don’t start a sentence with a coordinating conjunction; Don’t end a sentence with a preposition; Don’t split infinitives. Usage myths are less widely known but circulate perennially in writing circles and among those who enjoy collecting pet peeves. For example: you can’t say drive slow or different than; decimate can’t mean destroy most of; aggravate can’t mean irritate; and so on.

The last two – complaints about decimate and aggravate – fall prey to the etymological fallacy: that a word should or must mean what it meant originally or long ago, and maybe in another language altogether. The fallacy does not take account of linguistic change, and rests on the false idea that words cannot or should not change their meanings.

These restrictions have no basis in grammatical correctness, yet they have survived for generations, passed on from teacher to pupil or stickler to stickler-in-waiting. They have been called “classroom folklore” (Joseph M. Williams), “Miss Thistlebottom’s Hobgoblins” (Theodore M. Bernstein), and “zombie rules” (Arnold Zwicky).

We don’t have to like or use new words and usages. I don’t use literally to intensify figurative statements, because it weakens its literal sense – and what other word means literally so literally? But I don’t gnash my teeth over people using it loosely; people have been using literally non-literally, sometimes literarily, for literally centuries. Besides, it can be funny.

Growing up, I developed a temporary dislike for singular data, but it didn’t take much research and reflection (and yes, data) for me to realise that there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. So I’m fine with either form, depending on context. Notice that no one complains about singular agenda or stamina nowadays. But please, resist singular criteria for now.

Correctness is primarily a matter of convention, and conventions change. Consistency should be applied only as far as common sense carries it. If we want to do justice to words, it’s necessary sometimes to adapt to shifts in their meaning and usage, and to update our ideas of what’s acceptable, where, and why.

Source: http://www.macmillandictionaryblog.com/a-foolish-consistency

Language Change, Internet speak, neologisms

How the internet is changing language

16 August 2010 Last updated at 09:01 GMT

Zoe Kleinman

'To Google' has become a universally understood verb and many countries are developing their own internet slang. But is the web changing language and is everyone up to speed?

 

In April 2010 the informal online banter of the internet-savvy collided with the traditional and austere language of the court room.

Christopher Poole, founder of anarchic image message board 4Chan, had been called to testify during the trial of the man accused of hacking into US politician Sarah Palin's e-mail account.

During the questioning he was asked to define a catalogue of internet slang that would be familiar to many online, but which was seemingly lost on the lawyers.

At one point during the exchange, Mr Poole was asked to define "rickrolling".

"Rickroll is a meme or internet kind of trend that started on 4chan where users - it's basically a bait and switch. Users link you to a video of Rick Astley performing Never Gonna Give You Up," said Mr Poole.

"And the term "rickroll" - you said it tries to make people go to a site where they think it is going be one thing, but it is a video of Rick Astley, right?," asked the lawyer.

"Yes."

"He was some kind of singer?"

"Yes."

"It's a joke?"

"Yes."

The internet prank was just one of several terms including "lurker", "troll" and "caps" that Mr Poole was asked to explain to a seemingly baffled court.

But that is hardly a surprise, according to David Crystal, honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Bangor, who says that new colloquialisms spread like wildfire amongst groups on the net.

"The internet is an amazing medium for languages," he told BBC News.

"Language itself changes slowly but the internet has speeded up the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly."

People using word play to form groups and impress their peers is a fairly traditional activity, he added.

"It's like any badge of ability, if you go to a local skatepark you see kids whose expertise is making a skateboard do wonderful things.

"Online you show how brilliant you are by manipulating the language of the internet."

 

 

Super slang

 

One example of this is evident in Ukraine, where a written variation of the national tongue has sprung up on internet blogs and message boards called "padronkavskiy zhargon" - in which words are spelled out phonetically.

It is often used to voice disapproval or anger towards another commentator, says Svitlana Pyrkalo, a producer at the BBC World Service Ukrainian Service.

 

"Computer slang is developing pretty fast in Ukraine," she said.

The Mac and Linux communities even have their own word for people who prefer Microsoft Windows - віндузятники (vinduzyatnyky literally means "Windowers" but the "nyky" ending makes it derogatory).

"There are some original words with an unmistakably Ukrainian flavour," said Ms Pyrkalo.

The dreaded force-quit process of pressing 'Control, Alt, Delete' is known as Дуля (dulya).

"A dulya is an old-fashioned Ukrainian gesture using two fingers and a thumb - something similar to giving a finger in Anglo-Saxon cultures," she said.

"And you need three fingers to press the buttons. So it's like telling somebody (a computer in this case) to get lost."

 

 

Word play

For English speakers there are cult websites devoted to cult dialects - "LOLcat" - a phonetic and deliberately grammatically incorrect caption that accompanies a picture of a cat, and "Leetspeak" in which some letters are replaced by numbers which stem from programming code.

 

"There are about a dozen of these games cooked up by a crowd of geeks who, like anybody, play language games," said Professor Crystal.

"They are all clever little developments used by a very small number of people - thousands rather than millions. They are fashionable at the moment but will they be around in 50 years' time? I would be very surprised."

For him, the efforts of those fluent in online tongues is admirable.

"They might not be reading Shakespeare and Dickens but they are reading and cooking up these amazing little games - and showing that they are very creative. I'm quite impressed with these movements."

 

 

Txt spk

 

One language change that has definitely been overhyped is so-called text speak, a mixture of often vowel-free abbreviations and acronyms, says Prof Crystal.

"People say that text messaging is a new language and that people are filling texts with abbreviations - but when you actually analyse it you find they're not," he said.

In fact only 10% of the words in an average text are not written in full, he added.

They may be in the minority but acronyms seem to anger as many people as they delight.

Stephen Fry once blasted the acronym CCTV (closed circuit television) for being "such a bland, clumsy, rythmically null and phonically forgettable word, if you can call it a word".

But his inelegant group of letters is one of many acronyms to earn a place in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).

The secret of their success is their longevity.

"We need evidence that people are using a word over a period of time," said Fiona McPherson, senior editor in the new words group at the OED.

She says the group looks for evidence that a word has been in use for at least five years before it can earn its place in the dictionary.

Such evidence comes in the form of correspondence from the public and trawling through dated material to find out when a term first started appearing.

Hence TMI (Too Much Information) and WTF (you may wish to look that one up for yourself) are in, while OMG (Oh My God) has yet to be included in the quarterly dictionary updates.

"Some people get quite exercised and say, 'do these things belong in our language?'," said Ms McPherson.

"But maybe this has always happened. TTFN [ta ta for now] is from the ITMA (It's That Man Again) radio series in the 1940s."

 

 

Word thief

There is no doubt that technology has had a "significant impact" on language in the last 10 years, says Ms McPherson.

Some entirely new words like the verb 'to google', or look something up on a search engine, and the noun 'app', used to describe programmes for smartphones (not yet in the OED), have either been recently invented or come into popular use.

But the hijacking of existing words and phrases is more common.

Ms McPherson points out that the phrase "social networking" debuted in the OED in 1973. Its definition - "the use or establishment of social networks or connections" - has only comparatively recently been linked to internet-based activities.

"These are words that have arisen out of the phenomenon rather than being technology words themselves," she added.

"Wireless in the 1950s meant a radio. It's very rare to talk about a radio now as a wireless, unless you're of a particular generation or trying to be ironic. The word has taken on a whole new significance."

For Prof Crystal it is still too early to fully evaluate the impact of technology on language.

"The whole phenomenon is very recent - the entire technology we're talking about is only 20 years old as far as the popular mind is concerned."

Sometimes the worst thing that can happen to a word is that it becomes too mainstream, he argues.

"Remember a few years ago, West Indians started talking about 'bling'. Then the white middle classes started talking about it and they stopped using it.

"That's typical of slang - it happens with internet slang as well."

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10971949 Technology reporter, BBC News

Language Change, Reference Books, Prescriptivism

'No, we shouldn’t just Google it': John Walsh laments the death of the reference book

Thursday, 1 September 2011

Sales of reference books are sinking fast as we turn online for the answers to life's big – and small – questions. But our civilisation would be infinitely poorer if Roget's, Brewer's and Fowler's go out of print, argues John Walsh

Here come the new words, rolling and tumbling towards us in their shiny, multi-hued novelty like those thousands of coloured balls that cascaded down a street in that television commercial. These are the words that have just joined the language, and have been included in the 12th edition of The Chambers Dictionary, out this week.

You won't be surprised to learn that "retweet" and "vuvuzela" have been admitted to the language, along with over-used terms such as "national treasure" and recessional clichés such as "double dip" and "quantitative easing". Other new entries take a moment for their meaning to become clear. There's "crowdsourcing" (meaning to canvass suggestions from the general public before adopting a course of action), "freegan" (someone who finds all their food, gratis, in supermarket bins), "upcycle" (to transform waste products into better-quality products) and "globesity" (the worldwide outbreak of morbid fatness in civilised countries).

Sceptics might wonder if words such as "globesity", far from being authentic popular slang on the streets of Dagenham or Detroit, were invented by a smart young lexicographer working at Chambers HQ, or were tweeted to the dictionary publishers by a smart alec in Tooting. But we have no time to worry about their status as echt English words, because there'll be more arriving in a few months, as Oxford University Press and its Cambridge equivalent and the other dictionary publishers bring out new editions with their own cargo of neologisms, and the publicity departments manufacture another flap over the admission of "metrosexual" or "rehab" to the hallowed temple of English.

You may detect a note of desperation in their pronouncements. But then they have much to despair about. Bluntly put, dictionaries are in trouble, and have been for years. The big, dusty, 2,000-page family dictionary has become surplus to requirements, as potential users have turned to the internet for their definitions. The figures for 2010 show that spending on dictionaries fell for the seventh consecutive year, to a record low of £9.2m. Single-language and bilingual dictionaries dropped 13 per cent. Other reference books, including atlases and home-learning titles, sank by 10 per cent. But as early as 2007 some publishers were predicting that paper dictionaries will die out completely, as the word-curious turn wholly online. And if they go the way of reel-to-reel tape recorders, vinyl records and camera film, we'll have lost a substantial source of intellectual delight: the reference shelf.

The reference shelf used to be something no professional writer or scrupulous journalist would be without: the books represented a small army of helpers in the fight to express oneself in writing or to understand obscure words or references in someone's work.

The volumes jostling for shelf space would be The Chambers Dictionary (or the Concise Oxford English), Roget's Thesaurus, The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Fowler's Modern English Usage, Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, The Oxford Companion to English Literature, and the Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors. Some of these may be unfamiliar to 21st-century readers; they were once considered essential. Roget's Thesaurus was the work you consulted when the word you were looking for was on the tip of your tongue but refused to come out. At least you knew the flipping word was to be found somewhere in the pages of Roget. If you were writing an article about translation and you'd already used the word "translation" four times and were searching for a word that meant something like "translation", you looked up Roget and found "version, rendering, crib, paraphrase, précis, abridgement, adaptation, decoding, decipherment..." along with several other semi-synonyms.

Fowler's Modern English Usage, which first appeared in 1926, was the 20th century's most influential style guide for writers – its author, Henry Watson Fowler, was anti-pretension, anti-pedantry, suspicious of old-fashioned rules of grammar and impatient with archaic terms and fancy foreign words. He was a sleek and witty writer, and it sometimes felt morally beneficial to be in his company.

Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable dates back to 1870, when the Rev E Cobham Brewer set out to explain to a new generation of autodidacts – aspiring readers without a university education – the literary allusions or learned phrases they met when reading classic authors or Times leaders. If you were puzzled by a mention, in a Victorian novel, of "Phalaris's bull", Brewer would tell you about the hapless brass sculptor Perillos, who proposed a new torture method to Phalaris, the tyrant of Agrigentum. He offered to cast a bronze bull with a door in its side; the victim would be locked in and roasted to death, while his wails and scream would issue from the bull's throat like a thrilling bovine bellow. The tyrant agreed to the commission – but said it should be tried out first on Perillos himself.

Don't you feel better for knowing that, for having it confirmed that you should never propose to a tyrant any scheme involving pain? Dipping into Brewer was always fun. Nowhere else would you be likely to stumble on the information that "hocus-pocus" – the word used by a magician to hoodwink his audience – is a satirical corruption of "hoc est corpus meum", the words said while the host is raised at the climax of the Catholic mass. Dipping into Fowler, you always came away knowing a lot more than when you opened it. There's a serendipitous joy in finding arcane information when turning the pages in search of something else.

Discovering the evolution of words is a constant pleasure. I once asked Magnus Magnusson, the late television quizmaster, if he'd managed to retain any of the million-odd pieces of information that had whizzed past him over the years on Mastermind. Very few, he said; but one was the derivation of the word "shibboleth". It means, of course, a slogan, catchphrase or "password" beloved of a certain group, sect or political party. He'd been delighted to find (in The Oxford English Dictionary) that it was the old Hebrew word for an ear of corn; and that, according to the Bible, during the war between the Gileadites and the Ephraimites, it was used as a lethal password – Ephraimites pronounced it "skibboleth" rather than "shibboleth" and any hapless soldier who couldn't say it properly was promptly executed.

Again – how pleasing to know this. It's precisely the kind of detail you'll find in a dictionary – and only in a paper dictionary with words on pages. There's shibboleth, and its fascinating etymology, in the current OED, and in my 10th-edition Chambers. But if I look it up online, on www.dictionary.cambridge.org, I'm given only the definition.

Traditional dictionaries are being gradually overtaken by a number of shrill online sites. Press the "search" key and, four times out of five, you'll get a curt, one-line definition. If you're lucky, you'll be given several shades of meaning (www.thefreedictionary.com makes a fair stab at being semantically comprehensive) – but of that word only, with no sense of its derivation or associations. Ask for a definition of "declare" and you'll get seven definitions of "declare" – but no helpful peripheral nods to "declaration", "declarative" or "declaredly". When online, you are never encouraged to browse, or stray, or graze around the word-meadow above and below the definition you've sought.

Those who suspect that online dictionaries are, to an alarming extent, callow, partial, crass and academically threadbare enterprises should read a recent blog on www.dictionary.com, which reported that several words have been deemed "obsolete" by Collins lexicographers (they include "charabanc" and "aerodrome") and won't be used in future Collins print dictionaries. "An argument could be made that, if a word is rarely used or searched for, it may not matter if it is in the dictionary or not," the website ruminated. This argument has been seen before – in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, where The Party deems that language has become too sprawling and unwieldy, and invents Newspeak to keep it under greater control. Instead of having 40 or 50 terms for "wicked" or "wrong", they say, let us agree to say "ungood" to mean all of them – and, if emphasis is needed, "doubleplusungood".

And if you want to see where democratic lexicography is heading online, check out the Urban Dictionary (at www.urbandictionary.com). It will acquaint you with more sexual terms than you dreamt existed, will amaze you with the ironclad illiteracy and vulgarity of the contributors, and will make your head spin with its vast lexicon of racist abuse (such as the thousand-odd phrases containing the word "nigger"). It's put together by online users for the edification of others. And they sure aren't going to listen to the chaps from the Chambers and Oxford lexicographical departments deliberating about whether some of the words should be admitted to the English language some day. Online, they're here already...

It's easy to feel a nostalgic throb for the old reference library on your desk. As the dictionary market steadily declines, and sales of thesauruses plummet by a shocking 24 per cent, the very word "thesaurus" has never sounded more like a dinosaur. But we should not be downhearted. We could be seeing the start of something, rather than the end. I predict a retro-revolution in writers' vocabularies. Faced with the internet's fascination with street language and lack of interest in old words, I can see us taking a perverse delight in embracing stridently Baroque, efflorescent English words from the lexicon of Dickens, Milton, Dr Johnson, Shakespeare himself, until our paragraphs are full of "slubberdegullion" and "tatterdemalion", "dundreary" and "mulligrubs", "snoozle" and "wallydrag". We will drive readers mad with inkhorn terminology. We will send them rushing to old-fashioned dictionaries to learn what on earth is meant by "absquatulate" and "jobbernowl". We shall not rest until every Independent reader is saying to him or herself, "I wonder what 'humdudgeon' means. I must just go and look it up..."

Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/no-we-shouldnrsquot-just-google-it-john-walsh-laments-the-death-of-the-reference-book-2347173.html

Language change and banned words

Which words should be thrown out of the English language?

By Ed West Politics Last updated: August 23rd, 2011

In the news this week – experts at Collins Dictionary have compiled a list of words that have fallen out of use in the past half-century.

Among them are “wittol” – a man who tolerates his wife's unfaithfulness; “drysalter”, a dealer in certain chemical products and foods; and “alienism”, the study and treatment of mental illness.

While I think the English language can do without "succedaneum" or "woolfell", and words always come and go, what has been tragic is the way that some other words have been zombified, changed to something altogether different to their real meaning. And while this happens naturally in language – artificial, awful and nice, for instance, all once had completely different meanings – what’s different is that these changes were deliberately made, by institutions and individuals, with the aim of distorting the political discourse. As the saying goes, 1984 was supposed to be a warning, not a manual.


Last year I wrote about words that had evolved completely different (and often contradictory) meanings, and which should officially be on the banned list, among them:

Clients – to mean criminals (when described by members of the justice system).

Diversity – Lots of middle-class people of various ethnic backgrounds who all went to the same schools, the same universities, watch the same programmes, read the same books and vote the same way.

Fairness – Tax.

Human rights – The right to have almost no possible limit on one’s personal gratification, whatever the reasoning and despite all commonly-agreed standards of natural justice.

Justice – More tax. (See social justice, racial justice, climate justice, etc.)

Vibrant – Scary and foreign.

Vulnerable – Criminals, as in “society’s most vulnerable”.


I’d add to these the following:

Gendered (or even gender, to mean sex).

Chair, as in a person rather than something a person sits on.

BCE

Global north/global south – I prefer Moe Szyslak's more honest definition: "one of those loser countries".

Dog-whistle. Except when applied, literally, to a dog whistle. Otherwise it means “I can’t actually argue with what you’re saying, so I’m going to argue with what I choose to interpret as what you’re saying”.

Any other suggestions for a banned list of words are welcome.

Source: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/edwest/100101913/which-words-should-be-thrown-out-of-the-english-language/

Mad Men, Language Change, Prescriptivism

Mad Men In a Good Place: How Did People Sound in 1963?

John McWhorter

 

Last Sunday’s third episode of this season’s Mad Men was one of the best in the series on many levels, which was why for me, a frequent little problem with the show stood out more than ever. Namely, the show’s depiction of how people speak is less accurate than the loving exactitude with attire, cocktails, product labels, and the like.

 

The most glaring example in this episode was what seems to have gone down as a memorable line from Peggy Olson, erstwhile secretary who is slowly climbing the corporate ladder. “I’m in a good place right now,” she says, which is dramatically compelling – it makes Peggy seem “cool,” a proto-feminist on her way to our modern reality, in contrast to what a dowdy little twinkie she seemed to be when we first met her. But would that woman use that expression in 1963?

Not that the expression is as new as many may think. Locutions have a way of going further back than intuition would suggest, just as it is something of a surprise to find out that the first McDonald’s opened way back in 1948 (or the first Wendy’s in 1969). I, for one, first heard “I’m in a good place” from a person of a rather New Age-y frame of mind in September 1994, and that certainly wasn’t the month it originated.

However, would a secretary from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, in a frilly collar have said “I’m in a good place right now” 31 years before that? Note, the issue is not a literal usage concerning physical location – some might think of the quotation from James 2, “And if you pay attention to the one who wears the fine clothing and say ‘You sit here in a good place,’ while you say to the poor man ‘You sit over there’ ...”. Catholic Peggy may well have known that passage. However, its modern usage is metaphorical, having to do with spirit and development. It wasn’t something Marlo Thomas’ Ann-Marie on That Girl would have said, even when she was in a good place.

More generally, however, the writers at Mad Men seem to have an idea that in the early sixties, people spoke more “properly” than they do now. And they did, in formal and public settings. Until the late sixties, there was a sense that language was to be cossetted and dressed up in public in the same way that one wore deodorant. Think of the old gesture of clearing your throat before Making a Speech, the speech having been carefully written out and practiced, as opposed to today when we prefer looser “talks.”

Crucially, this sense included how people were depicted as speaking in movies. Even when the characters were speaking casually (i.e. most of the time), there was a sense that as a public performance, a film was to show people using language more “properly” than they actually would. Standards were looser for comics, of course. But, for instance, Letter to Three Wives has Linda Darnell growing up poor in a shabby flat. Yet while her mother speaks working-class American, Darnell has the flawless elocution of a dramatics student.

Sure, people can tilt their speech “upward” in line with social aspiration – but traces almost always remain, especially when people relax or are excited. The Darnell character in real life, hoping to get out of the tenements, would likely not have sounded just like her mother (just as Peggy Olson doesn’t sound like hers). However, she wouldn’t have sounded exactly like someone out of My Man Godfrey either. Speech habits – especially accent – are learned early and deeply ingrained. To speak as an adult with no trace of how you spoke at ten is as tough as learning a foreign language with no accent after the age of about 16.

The Mad Men characters are often like Linda Darnells in this regard – especially, for some reason, the younger ones. One senses that the creators see people talking like that in the movies of the period and suppose that this reflected messy old real life. But in reality, how people spoke casually was as unlike written language as it is now, and not just among stevedores. For example, in 1950 a linguist (in the classic Leave Your Language Alone) quoted a newspaper ad for “grammar lessons”:

How many of these frequent errors in English do YOU make? Do YOU say KEW-pon for KOO-pon, ad-ver-TISE-ment for ad-VER-tise-ment, or AD-ult for ad-ULT? Almost everybody makes these blunders in English: between you and I, it’s me, those kind of books.

So: the idea that there is something especially “slovenly” about how people talk “these days” is one that people had in 1963 as well (and long, long, long before). Which means that folks, just-folks, when going about on an informal basis did not sound like Disney announcers and Joan Crawfords (on the latter, her movie voice was sharply distinct from her casual one).

In Sunday’s Mad Men episode, therefore, when Jennifer Crane gets up and takes her husband over the Drapers’ table saying “I want to” see how they are, crisply pronouncing want separately from to, it’s false. That woman, even with her poise and aggressive social aspirations, would have said wanna just as we all do when we are not reading from text or laying down an answering mcahine message. The want to would have been all the more unlikely from someone who had had a drink or two (especially the stiff ones still ordinary on Mad Men as opposed to today’s Chardonnay).

Vincent Kartheiser’s Pete Campbell talks this way constantly, the idea being to convey that he is a high-WASP scion. However, people are people and especially, boys have always been boys. Would a real Pete Campbell, even knocking back highballs as is his wont, really casually talk like a Hardy Boy with the crisp, measured diction?

Relevant here would be how a similarly minded American aristocrat spoke in that same year of 1963. In recordings of John F. Kennedy speaking off-the-cuff with Robert McNamara in October of that year, not long after Pete and his wife did that nifty dance routine at that party, we hear someone talking the way, basically, we talk. Listen here.

Remember that the ah’s in words like “rah-ther” are his famous Boston accent, which one can still hear cabdrivers there using; it’s not Kennedy sounding British. And beyond that listen to how ordinary, unmeasured, Kennedy sounded – nothing of the want-t-to sort. He says “Yeah,” not “Yes,” and “...without makin’ a formal statement about it” rather than making.

I certainly understand that Mad Men is a confection, and on a certain level enjoy the characters’ aristocratic tones as an artifice just as we all enjoy the too-perfect costumes and saturated color. However, an artifice it is: when we read of producer Matthew Weiner and his crew attending to actors “getting the language right,” the “right” in question is not the same kind of “right” as concerns the toys and fabrics and magazine fonts.

Often, it’s “right” in the way that we like to think ordinary people spoke 50 years ago – sometimes including expressions unknown to them, but so deft that we can’t help putting them in their mouths.

Source: http://www.tnr.com/blog/john-mcwhorter/mad-men-good-place-how-did-people-sound-1963

Mad Men, Prescriptivism

Did We Speak More “Properly” 50 Years Ago?

Posted on August 7, 2011 by trawicks

Like countless others, I’m a fan of Mad Men. One of the things I find fascinating about the show is the choice its creators made about the speech of the characters. The series almost completely eschews regional dialects (it takes place in New York, yet there are hardly any New York accents*), instead going for a slightly fanciful array of “period dialects.”

I recently stumbled on an excellent old John Mcwhorter article that unpackages the curious speech habits of the series’ dramatis personae. I was particularly struck by this assertion:

More generally, however, the writers at Mad Men seem to have an idea that in the early sixties, people spoke more “properly” than they do now. And they did, in formal and public settings. Until the late sixties, there was a sense that language was to be cossetted and dressed up in public in the same way that one wore deodorant.

Did people indeed once have a more “formal” register than they do now? This is a difficult question to answer in America. If we were having this conversation about the other side of the pond, it would be a no brainer: given how different British attitudes were toward speech a mere fifty years ago, it’s no surprise that the public school student of 2011 doesn’t talk like the public school student of 1961.

But in America? I would hazard to guess that people of my grandparents’ generation weren’t any more likely to take elocution lessons than I was. So why would there be more of a distinction between formal and informal registers in the early 60′s than there is now?

I doubt that we ever, as Americans, abandoned the “formal register.” I certainly speak with more crisply pronounced consonants at a job interview than I do hanging out in a car with my brother. The details of what this register entails may differ from one generation to the next, but I don’t think the phenomenon is going away.

However, I do think this type of “elevated” speech is used differently now than it was in the 1950s. Particularly when it comes to media: until the mid-twentieth Century, “realistic” film was usually more heightened, formal, and idealized. What the market forces were that dictated this I’ve never quite understood. But television seemed to usher in a new era of narrative media, one where the focus is on characters who are normal, average and recognizable rather than those who are dashing, glamorous and speak like aristocratic 19th-Century New Englanders.

While watching Alfred Hitchcock Presents, a show from the 1950′s, I often notice this change in action. The older generation of actors largely speak with artificial “mid-Atlantic accents”, while younger actors (such as Robert Morse and John Cassavetes) speak in startlingly informal registers. It’s an interesting example of how rapidly attitudes were changing at the time.

Of course, there’s always the simple fact of language change. Each generation weakens some aspects of the previous generation’s speech. What, then, makes older dialects “formal” sounding?

*At times, Mad Men seems almost willfully anachronistic in this regard.  There’s something bizarre about watching the very Californian-sounding Elisabeth Moss sit down to dinner with her Brooklyn-accented family.  But I have to admit I don’t mind this.  It somehow fits with one of the larger themes of this series, the way that Americans try to make themselves into individualistic, transient, non-regional supermen.

Source: http://dialectblog.com/2011/08/07/did-we-speak-more-properly/