Madonna’s recent moonlighting stint as a dictionaries marketing executive is still paying dividends: another thousand people have looked up reductive since we discussed it last Monday, and it’s been the single most looked up word for the last two weeks.

If you remember, Madge had said of a Lady Gaga song: “When I heard it on the radio, I said, ‘That sounds very familiar. It feels reductive.’ ”

But what exactly did she mean? It’s possible that she got the wrong word, and meant to say derivative. That would have been understandable in the context, and the interviewer would not have needed to ask if this “was a good thing”.  But it would have been a much more open criticism, and by using a word like reductive, she’s managed to create a mystique around the whole business. It’s either an accidental slip of the tongue, or very clever linguistically-driven PR.

In 2011, there were 252 searches for the word reductive in the Macmillan Dictionary. So in the 7 days from 13th to 19th January inclusive, we would have expected to see 5.

In fact, we had well over 2,000 individual searches for the word reductive.

The reason, it would appear, was a comment made by Madonna with reference to a Lady Gaga song, Born This Way. In the course of an interview with Cynthia McFadden on ABC Radio, Madge said:

When I heard it on the radio, I said, ‘That sounds very familiar. It feels reductive.’

The interviewer, sensing that this might be a veiled criticism of Lady Gaga, asked if this was a good thing. Madonna ‘smiled coyly, took a sip of tea and said, “Look it up.”’

And a lot of people did just that.

The weekly roundup on Friday carries a link to a story about the renaming of a well-known chain of British bookstores. It’s Farewell to Waterstones’s and Hello to Waterstones.

Losing an apostrophe won’t make any difference to the pronunciation, but nonetheless the name change has been greeted with some outrage by some of the more linguistically conservative commentators – the chairman of the Apostrophe Protection Society was quoted as describing the change as slapdash.

In proper names, the presence or absence of an apostrophe seems to be somewhat arbitrary. One of the most famous shops in London has always been called Harrods, while one of the most famous supermarket chains is called Sainsbury’s – though of course the URL for Sainsbury’s won’t allow an apostrophe, so it’s sainsburys.co.uk. Both Oxford and Cambridge Universities have a St Catherine’s College, but while Oxford has college called The Queen’s College (presumably linked to one queen) Cambridge has a Queens’ College (presumably linked to more than one queen).

On the London Underground, (thanks to John Wells for these) you can go through Earl’s Court and then Barons Court; you need your apostrophe about you at King’s Cross, but not at Colliers Wood or Golders Green.

Given that in the spoken language there is no difference between Waterstone’s and Waterstones, and that there is never any apostrophe-driven ambiguity in speech, I’m inclined to agree with Gwyneth Fox that we might as well get rid of all apostrophes altogether.

We get a few people looking up acronyms and initialisms used in emails and text messages, but there was a massive surge in look-ups for LOL on 3rd January. In the space of 24 hours, the number of searches went from virtually zero to 1,000, and then just as quickly subsided to former levels.

The dictionary gives two uses of LOL. One is “laughing out loud”, and the other is “lots of love”, typically used at the end of an email or text message. It’s probably useful to know, when you are emailing or texting someone, which use of LOL that person is familiar with. Sometimes it might not matter, but at other times it could be quite a problem.

There is a possibly apocryphal but nonetheless perfectly plausible story of someone sending an email to a friend, commiserating on the death of the friend’s mother:

So sorry to hear your mother passed away. LOL.

As you can imagine, there was no reply to the email.

One of the top words looked up over the Christmas period was the word grinch. Most people know the word from the Dr Seuss story How the Grinch Stole Christmas which was made into a cartoon for TV and later a live-action movie.

As well as being the name of the fictional character, the word grinch is now also applied to anyone who shows a lack of willingness to participate in Christmas jollity.

The archetypal British anti-Christmas character is Ebenezer Scrooge, who appears in Charles Dickens’ tale A Christmas Carol. Scrooge is very mean and treats his employees extremely badly, but after seeing a series of ghosts, he realises what a good time Christmas should be and joins in the festivities generously and wholeheartedly.

Like grinch, the word Scrooge saw a sharp rise in the number of look-ups, but the two words will probably now lie low until December next year when the Christmas season returns.

Newspaper headlines have the task of trying to convey the essence of a story in a very short space. To achieve this, they often compress the syntax, leaving out articles or other grammatical glue. With the absence of such glue, ambiguities can arise, as it’s not always easy to spot the part of speech of some of the words involved. A recent headline in my local paper read:

Bright sparks weather gala night power cut to party on

The problem here is that of the eight lexical words involved, five can be either a noun or a verb, and if you make one wrong assumption, you end up failing completely to understand what is meant.

Sparks, for example, could be the third person singular present tense of the verb spark, meaning to set off or initiate. That would require the word bright to be a noun, as this would be the subject of the verb, but bright doesn’t really have any noun uses in English. In fact, what we’re seeing here is a compound noun, bright sparks, meaning clever or lively people.

Weather can be either noun and verb, and this is the crucial word in this headline. Here, it’s a verb, meaning to endure or survive, and the meaning of the headline starts to become clear. The bright sparks survive a gala night power cut to party on. We still need to disentangle gala night power cut, and both power and cut are potentially nouns or verbs. Here, they’re both nouns, and we’re talking about a power cut that happens in the course of a night when a gala is being held. So the bright sparks survive a loss of electricity during their gala night… to party on. Party is yet another ambiguous word as far as its part of speech is concerned, and here it’s not just a verb, but a phrasal verb, formed by the addition of the particle on to add the extra meaning of continuation (see Michael Rundell’s recent post  in which he touches on the way in which particles can be used to form phrasal verbs with a predictable meaning).

So the meaning finally reveals itself as People attending a gala night survived a loss of electricity and continued to enjoy the party.

It’s the Plain English Awards season again, as Stan Carey noted in his recent post, and across the country winners are basking in the glory of an award or ruing their luck in being singled out as exemplars of gobbledygook.

One of the recipients of a “Golden Bull Award” (for the year’s ‘best’ examples of gobbledygook) was the British Met Office. Their particular crime was to refer to ‘probabilities of precipitation’ rather than, say, ‘the chances of rain’.

In their defence, they pointed out that the word precipitation covers all sorts of things falling out of the sky, not just rain. There’s also sleet, snow, hail and even, apparently, graupel. Furthermore, as they point out ‘The same weather system could produce snow, sleet and rain across even quite a relatively small area’ so it is not necessarily helpful to specify just one of those. They have a point, but the trouble with precipitation is that it’s thought of as a slightly technical term, in a way that sleet or hail is not. All three are black words in MED, so not among the most frequent 7,500 words in the language, yet only precipitation attracts a subject label in the dictionary entry.

But to my mind, a much more culpable abuse of language was perpetrated by one of the other winners, a low-cost airline, in a letter responding to a customer’s complaint. The first paragraph, of approximately 60 words, reads:

I believe that what has not been explained to you is that it is not a £4.50 card charge, in the process of booking a flight, you will have a booking fee which is for a Credit Card (return journey), booking fee £4.50 and Credit Card supplement £1.00, for a (one way) booking fee £5.50 and credit card charge £1.00.

The second paragraph is even longer, at 83 words, and no more comprehensible.

Surprisingly, the winner of the “Foot in Mouth” award for public gaffes is Silvio Berlusconi – who as far as I know tends to speak Italian. Among other gaffes, he reportedly said ‘I am pretty often faithful’. A gaffe, indeed, but hardly one that transgresses the norms of English.

The “Kick in the pants” award went to an organization that we used to call the Inland Revenue but now have to call Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (informally still known as the taxman, a name that might have been a suitable topic for our gender English month) for the simple fact of having generated ‘an unacceptable amount of public complaints received by Plain English Campaign in 2011′. One wonders whether the complaints were really about the language or about the message.

But as in all years, there are also awards for the worthy. This year’s “International Media Award” went to China Daily ‘For the clear communication of business news to a global audience.’ Congratulations to China Daily, and indeed to all winners of this year’s awards.

In the UK, our bringer of Christmas presents spends the night of December 24th coming down chimneys and leaving presents for children to find on the morning of Christmas Day. We call him Father Christmas, though he’s also known as Santa Claus. On what we like to call the Continent many people give presents and celebrate on December 6th, which is the saint’s day of Saint Nicholas (or święty Mikołaj or Saint Nicolas or Heilige Nikolaus or… well, it depends on where in Europe you are).

In Holland, he’s known as Sinterklaas – and Sinterklaas is the origin of the name Santa Claus. They must be very impatient in Holland, because the Dutch can’t even wait until December 6th, and do their present-giving on the eve of Sinterklaas, the evening of December 5th.

To help you through the excitement of Christmas, there’s an Advent Calendar you can check between now and Christmas Eve. Every day, there’s a new little nugget of festive information. You could open all the windows at once, but it’s much more fun to do it day by day.

It was Thanksgiving last Thursday, and traffic from the US to the dictionary site was down by 50% on Thursday of the week before.  So I wasn’t expecting the US to be entering the greatest number of searches that day.

As it happened, the two most searched for items on Thanksgiving were lip plumper and pout, and all the searches came from India. I assumed the two searches were unconnected, but I’ve now made the connection thanks to Wikipedia‘s explanation that lip plumper is a kind of lip gloss that is intended to make your lips a little fuller, and that ‘Lip plumpers are used by those with thinner lips when full, “pouty” lips are desired’. Frankly, it’s not a product that I would rush out to buy, but different strokes for different folks, as they say.

Last week’s favourite entry on the Open Dictionary, reverse ferret, is a colourful way of talking about a complete change of policy, a change that is all the more startling because the person or organisation who changes their mind was so strongly in favour of the original policy.

There are other ways of describing such a change: an about-turn (also about-face), a volte-face (borrowed from French), or a U-turn.

When politicians do a U-turn, they are often taken to task in the press. It’s seen as being indecisive. In 1980, when Margaret Thatcher (now Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven) was prime minister, she gave a speech at her party conference at a time when a number of her own MPs were beginning to change their minds about certain policies. Despite being renowned for having little or no sense of humour, Mrs Thatcher’s comment on the situation was surprisingly droll.

“To those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catchphrase, the U-turn, I have only one thing to say: You turn if you want to” she said, making a pun, as U-turn and You turn sound exactly the same in speech.

She then went on to say “The lady’s not for turning”. This flummoxed a number of people, but is a reference to a 1948 play by Christopher Fry called The Lady’s not for Burning. It is believed that Mrs Thatcher herself was unaware of the reference, but its presence in her speech is explained by the fact that her speechwriter (you didn’t think politicians wrote their own gags, did you?) was Ronald Millar, himself a well-known playwright.

(For those of you who are keen, you can see a clip of the quip here; for those of you who are especially keen, the whole text of the speech can be found here. Just don’t expect any more jokes.)