Author Archive
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Posted by Stan Carey on May 15, 2012
English has a variety of options for when we want to express contrition or remorse. We can say we’re sorry, we apologise, we regret something. We can emphasise it by saying ‘I’m so/very/really/truly/awfully sorry’, and so on. Or we can just say ‘Apologies’. Convention dictates in part how this and other ritualised speech acts take [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on May 01, 2012
Despite its popularity and contagiousness, linguistic inflation is strongly resisted in some contexts. You’re unlikely to read ‘totally epic’ in a philosophy book, ‘unbelievably amazing’ in an academic essay, or ‘Best. Results. Ever.’ in a scientific paper. But in other, less formal contexts, inflation thrives; one such place is real estate language. In this world, [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on April 17, 2012
To continue the semantic theme of my last post, today I want to look at inflation. Linguistic inflation is analogous to economic inflation, but it concerns a devaluation in meaning rather than price. Inflation lies behind the popular use of such words as genius, epic, awesome, totally, and incredible. What they mean is often more [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on April 03, 2012
There has been a lot of talk lately about The Hunger Games. Though I haven’t seen or read it yet, it reminded me of a conversation I had on Twitter about a lesser-known meaning of the word starve. In Ireland, especially the northern province of Ulster, you will sometimes hear people say starved or starving [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on March 20, 2012
I mentioned the term mumbo-jumbo in my recent survey of reduplication. Claptrap and bunkum (a near-reduplicative) did not feature, but all three are among a great many words the English language has for conveying the idea of nonsense, rubbish, rot, drivel, tripe – you get the picture. Each of these terms has its own nuances, [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on March 01, 2012
Argy-bargy and lovey-dovey lie on opposite ends of the interpersonal scale, but they have something obvious in common: both are reduplicatives. Reduplication is when a word or part of a word is repeated, sometimes modified, and added to make a longer term, such as aye-aye, mishmash, and hotchpotch. This process can mark plurality or intensify [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on February 20, 2012
“I stood at her helm, and for long hours silently guided the way of this fire-ship on the sea.” The old nautical word helm is likely to evoke a salty sea image such as one from Herman Melville’s mighty Moby-Dick – that is, of a wheel or similar gear used to steer a boat or [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on February 06, 2012
The attention paid to grammar and style can overshadow something equally significant about language: that it is so often and so naturally playful. In our love of puns and Scrabble, riddles and nonsense, rhyming slang and literary experimentation, we see the instinctive inclination to play with words and letters as though they were an abstract [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on January 23, 2012
Learning a rule or convention in language gives people a secure footing in an area of usage. When the convention is ignored or challenged, this can undermine the pocket of security and offend people’s sense of what is proper and necessary. This might help explain the levels of anxiety and outrage we see when, for [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on January 09, 2012
Macmillan Dictionary’s discussion of plain English continues in the New Year, and though we cannot expect a year in which clear and meaningful language entirely replaces vague and convoluted language, it remains something to aim at for those of us concerned with good communication. In its Golden Bull awards last month, the Plain English Campaign [...]
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