So, somebody please tell me when the word fine stopped being fine?

When exchanging greetings with friends, I used to reply to any enquiry as to my health as ‘Fine, thanks’. When I still lived up North, a wry ‘Mustn’t grumble’ would usually suffice. This does not seem to be adequate any longer. People have begun to come back at me with ‘Just fine?’. What does that mean?! Isn’t fine fine anymore?

In the 1990s I worked for a US employer and there, uttering the word fine in response to a ‘HEY! How are ya?’ was tantamount to sharing suicidal feelings with a colleague. When asked how he was faring, my boss would gush in excruciatingly jolly tones, ‘I’m doing just GREAT thanks!’.  I find nowadays that my standard response is similar: ‘Great, thanks … you?’. Vicki Hollett talked about the difference between British and American meanings of certain words last week.

The thing is that fine these days just seems to mean ‘Oh, OK I suppose’, and it has also developed other, even less positive connotations:

‘So you won’t be able to make our anniversary dinner because you have to work late again? … FINE!’ – a declaration of war if ever I heard one.

Why won’t fine do anymore? Philip Kerr’s recent series on Hooray and Boo words in MED Magazine seems to sum it up for me. This is the concept that certain words produce a very definitely positive or negative response in a reader or listener. Everything has to be big and extreme and elicit an ecstatic response – otherwise we are not truly engaged, not truly alive. Why feel just fine, when you can feel GREAT? I just wonder what made fine slip to the bottom of the acceptably-positive league table all of a sudden?

The African Americans have reclaimed this word in a most inspiring way. They have taken it right back to its loveliest meaning. Not for them does ‘you look fine’ mean ‘you look perfectly acceptable’. They mean ‘you look FINE!’: think fine fabrics; fine jewellery, fine wines, kind of fine. I think these chaps have the right idea and that we should follow suit and make fine FINE once again.

If anyone reading this has found any words in the Macmillan Dictionary that have slipped or slunk from one meaning in common usage to another, please feel free to add such comments below – it’s FINE with me!

I took this photo outside my local copy shop last week. Right at the top of the sign is one of the products which the business supplies: calenders. Now these guys are in the printing business so they know about proofreading, spellchecking, and so on – yet they still couldn’t get the spelling right. But it struck me that maybe 95% of people passing the sign wouldn’t notice the misspelling, whereas 100% of people passing would know what the sign was advertising. Which raises the question: does it matter how it’s spelled, as long as there is no misunderstanding?

Humans are good at resolving ambiguities in language. Most words have more than one meaning, so even a short sentence like Her heart was beating fast is – theoretically – open to multiple interpretations, since heart, beat, and fast all have several meanings. But in practice (assuming speakers are fluent) we almost always understand one another, and there is no need to qualify an utterance like I’m going the bank by adding and by the way, I mean the financial institution, not the side of the river.

Could the same apply to spelling? If we understand the intended message, does it matter if the spelling is ‘wrong’? When Dr. Johnson was planning his great dictionary in the mid-18th century, he saw part of his job as regularizing the spelling of English words. He described English orthography as ‘unsettled and fortuitous’, observing that ‘there is still great uncertainty among the best criticks’. Shakespeare’s name, in his own lifetime, was spelled in several different ways, including Shakespere, Shakspeare, and Shakspere, and this doesn’t seem to have been a cause for concern at the time.

Gradually, the notion emerged that there was one ‘correct’ spelling for every word, and dictionaries have helped to establish norms in this area as much as in areas like meaning and pronunciation. But perhaps things are now coming full circle: as more and more people become ‘published’ writers (through their blogs, tweets, or Facebook pages), we’re seeing greater variability in the way words are spelled. The constraints of text messaging, and the ingenious abbreviations this has spawned, have influenced this process too.

As it happens, there is a noun calender, meaning a machine with rollers used for giving cloth or paper a glossy surface. So in the right context, the sentence We must get a new calender could mean exactly that. But this is too technical and infrequent a term to get into the Macmillan Dictionary. Interestingly, if you type calender into the dictionary, it asks you if you really meant calendar (and you almost certainly did). But if you do the same in a very large dictionary like Wordnik, you get taken to a definition for the rarer word. And if you then ask Wordnik for examples of calender, it turns out they are all really misspelled references to calendars! Confusion all round. Maybe there is something to be said for good spelling after all?

In this post, we collect your thoughts and colourful stories about English in Brazil. Have you got similar stories to tell? Come and share it with us!

Marcos writes …

I am not a typical Brazilian English speaker because I learned Portuguese and English at the same time since kindergarten. I have also lived for a while in the US, so I guess I lost my Brazilian accent. People from different English-speaking countries I have visited, including the UK, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada, can never really guess where I come from.

If I go anywhere else and speak in English, though, they immediately assume I am American. I even suffered discrimination in Denmark during the Bush years, when I could not convince a drunk local in a 7-11 convenience shop that I came from South America not the U.S. I guess his geography was a bit mixed-up, and he ended up saying: “Don’t worry, you’re welcome in Denmark even if you are American.” 

Brazilians love to translate literally, as a joke, local expressions or slang into English, so some expressions would only make sense to other Brazilians. I book your face (eu livro a sua cara) is one of them. The meaning of this in Portuguese would be something like ‘I will take the blame for it’. And there’s the joke about the Portuguese (yes, me make jokes about them) who spent years learning English, and when he went back home and his wife knocked on the door he answered Between, Maria (= Entre Maria, if translated literally).

I am trying to think of words in English that came from Portuguese, but other than açai (the berry from Amazon) that became very popular in the U.S. and capoeira (the martial dance created by Brazilian slaves) nothing comes to mind.

Fábio writes …

I have interesting stories to share about English. We have English words that are only used in Brazil. They have a different meaning in the US, UK, Canada etc. For example: a spare tire in Brazil is called step. A mall we call shopping because of shopping mall. Since shopping isn’t a word in Portuguese, instead of saying shopping mall, people started saying just shopping (it is shorter). …

An interesting story happened to my sister when she was studying English. The word ordinary has a similar word in spelling here, but with a totally different meaning. The word ordinário in Portuguese has a negative meaning. It’s offensive. It means something like scoundrel. So, one day my sister’s teacher asked my sister’s classmate if her father was an ordinary man. Her classmate didn’t like it and felt offended. She replied back: My dad isn’t ordinário!

Our Brazil English month continues with another guest post, this time by Denilso de Lima,  ELT author, teacher trainer, conference speaker and member of the blogosphere. Denilso prepares us for Carnaval by introducing some creative word formation processes in Brazinglish.

________

Here in Brazil, I have heard lots of common mistakes Brazilian learners make when speaking English. For instance, learners often have difficulty with final consontants in words such as whisk, sweet and book. So, one may hear these words pronounced as whisky, sweetie and bookie instead.

That’s OK! Teachers’ task is to help their learners notice the difference and problem solved! Now, what is more curious in Brazil is something called the embromation of English.

Embromation comes from the Brazilian Portuguese verb embromar and the English suffix -ation. Embromar means lots of things, but in this context it can be loosely interpreted as:

the process of creating words and sentences from words and (maybe) sentences you know to make something people think is real English

The magic of embromation, whose equivalent in Brazilian Portuguese is embromação, is this:

I create a language which may sound like English but it is not English at all

Having defined embromation, I have to add that this ‘invention’ also makes use of similarities in the way Portuguese and English words sound. An example of this is the sentence “U á tem som di u?”, which in English sounds something like “What ten son dee ooo?”. I know it means absolutely nothing, but if you say it really fast here in Brazil, it sounds like English. Incredibly, some naive people here in Brazil may believe that it is real English. (If you are wondering, this nonsense sentence means: ‘Is the letter a pronounced like the letter u?’ Crazy, huh?)

Although it is a play on words and the way those words sound, I have to warn you that sometimes things get real around here. As you may know, Carnaval, the most famous Brazilian holiday, is starting later this week. So this year, embromation has its place guaranteed at almost every party all over the country.

An axé group (axé is a common style of music in Brazil) created a new song and dance called Rebolation. For those who might be wondering: rebolation comes from the verb rebolar (meaning ‘to move and shake the hips in a sensual and sexy way’) and, of course, the suffix -ation. Another magical creation of embromation.

So, are you coming to Brazil for Carnaval? Be aware of embromation as well as rebolation. I am pretty sure you are going to have lots of fun. If you are not coming, don’t worry: embromation will still be around for some time.

It’s gearing up for Carnaval in Brazil and as the world wishes it was there for the party, what better time to ask the question: What’s your English, Brazil? We’re dedicating February to Brazil English and here’s our first guest post from Jussara Simões, translator, interpreter and blogger.

____________

Nobody can deny that English has today the role that Latin had in the days of the Roman Empire. And, just like the Romans used to do, the English language has been spreading its power around the world, and it comes in without knocking. Brazil is not a bilingual country; Portuguese is our national language, but lots of us are trying hard to learn English quickly, because it’s a requirement for good jobs.

When the English language forces its entry into a Romance language country, amazing things happen. Some of the funniest misunderstandings come from the terms known as “false friends”, i. e., words that seem to be what they are not. A few examples:

Condescending – the Portuguese cognate, “condescendente”, means exactly the opposite, but “condescendente” is what you find in bilingual dictionaries, and I wonder why.

Stupid – the Portuguese cognate, “estúpido”, means rude, discorteous, impolite; it does not mean lacking in intelligence, and the translation of stupid should be “burro” and its synonyms. I must add that the wrong translation is also found in bilingual dictionaries.

Some amusing Brazinglish terms cause lots of laughter around the world. There’s a device called “uninterruptible power supply”, or “UPS”. In Brazil our IT marketing people decided to call it “no-break” (yes, it sounds like “me Tarzan you Jane”, but that’s how English is spoken in Brazil). Many years ago, when “no-breaks” were first introduced in Brazil, I had a hard time explaining to my colleagues abroad what the heck I meant when I said I was using a “no-break”.

Brazilians are known for their improvising talent. Businesses have been replacing Portuguese with English, but the majority of our people have a hard time with those English terms, and they eventually create their own Brazinglish terms. Some examples are: “serve-serve”, a term invented by those who find it difficult to pronounce self-service; “pé de mouse” (literally “mouse foot”), instead of mouse pad: the word pad, pronounced by Brazilians, sounds like “pé de” (foot of), so it was quickly adapted and “translated” as “pé de mouse”, and I applaud Brazilians’ creativity and sense of humor.

____________

Visit the blog for more guest posts from Brazil in February. And why not submit your own guest post? We’d be delighted to hear from you!

Below are links to some of our most popular posts of the year. Many of the posts still have ongoing conversations so don’t hesitate to leave a comment!

Horrible Americanisms?
Who decides what is “good” or “correct” English when the way it is spoken differs from country to country?

Casting a spell on English.
Stephen Bullon’s series of posts on the English language.

Dude, where’s my definition?
So dude, do you surf? Do you ride the tail or prefer to have your toes on the nose?

Why it pays to hedge your bets in English.
Without hedges the social fabric of our nation would be torn apart; there would be constant brawling in post office queues across the land.

Bored of life? What Dr. Johnson didn’t say.
Samuel Johnson famously said that “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life”.

Are you lovin’ it?
Everything you know about the present continuous is wrong … it’s all Justin Timberlake’s fault.

I’m beginning to hate apostrophes!
If we can’t get apostrophes right, let’s do what Birmingham is doing and get rid of them completely.

Cardiganed old duffers? A lexicographer responds.
Let’s deconstruct this. First, you apparently have to be old in order to be a real lexicographer (not like those young upstarts who create dictionaries in cyberspace).

King’s English.
King says: ‘Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule’.

Pwn leet speak: a dynamic sublanguage and internet phenomenon.
Apparently, throughout human existence, males have demonstrated their mating fitness by inventing and displaying new and innovative communication forms.

Saying dates.
Why, for example, do we say nineteen hundred (1900) but two thousand (2000)?

Well, it’s over. The Plain English Campaign 2009 awards were announced yesterday, and one of the winners was Lord Mandelson. Having left the cabinet twice in less than ideal circumstances, Mandelson is back in a position of some authority, and is seen as the government’s Great Communicator. But this observation, referring to the MPs’ expenses scandal, earned him the Foot in Mouth award:

Perhaps we need not more people looking round more corners but the same people looking round more corners more thoroughly to avoid the small things detracting from the big things the Prime Minister is getting right.

Congratulations, Lord Mandelson.

From the US, American Airlines walked away with a Golden Bull award for having sent a “Property irregularity receipt” to a passenger whose luggage had been lost. We have no information as to the whereabouts of the passenger’s sense of humour, but I imagine it would have come in useful.

The UK Department of Health also picked up a Golden Bull for this observation on disease prevention:

Primary prevention includes health promotion and requires action on the determinants of health to prevent disease occurring. It has been described as refocusing upstream to stop people falling in the waters of disease.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll want to read that a second time just in case you misread it the first time. So here it is again. Read and marvel:

Primary prevention includes health promotion and requires action on the determinants of health to prevent disease occurring. It has been described as refocusing upstream to stop people falling in the waters of disease.

But before you run away with the idea that Plain English Campaign is solely about putting the boot in, they also recognize good practice. The Birmingham Mail received an award for being Best Regional Newspaper; the Forestry Commission’s pamphlet about Lyme disease won an Inside Write award, as did the Royal Navy for its magazine Navy News: “a good example of plain English written for an intended audience.” And an award for being one of the clearest documents of the year went to the World Cancer Research Fund for a leaflet on breast cancer. You can see all the awards on the Plain English Campaign website.

And finally, back across the Atlantic, we find a tax form which the Department of the Treasury Internal Revenue Service sends to suppliers who are not based in the US. Obviously, if you’re a supplier and you’re not based in the US you’ll have been wondering just what kind of entity you are. A hybrid entity, perhaps? Or maybe a reverse hybrid entity? Don’t worry – the form makes things crystal clear with these two definitions:

Hybrid entity – a hybrid entity is any person (other than an individual) that is treated as fiscally transparent in the US…
Reverse hybrid entity – a reverse hybrid entity is any person (other than an individual) that is not fiscally transparent under US tax law principles…

See? Simples!

“Perhaps I could say, by way of introduction, welcome to our stakeholders. We look forward to our engagement, as we roll out our dialogue on a level playing field, so that, going forward in the public domain, we have a win-win step change that is fit for purpose across the piece.”

That was Dr Tony Wright, chair of the Parliamentary Public Administration Committee, at the beginning of a session during which the committee was to take oral evidence from four witnesses in preparation for a report entitled “Bad Language: The Use and Abuse of Official Language“.

Dr Wright’s tongue was firmly in his cheek as he uttered that introduction, but it’s a serious enough topic. According to the report, some tax forms are so badly worded that “unintentional errors” made by people filling them in result in around £300 million in underpaid tax each year.

Incomprehensible language has long been the target of Plain English Campaign, a group set up 30 years ago to combat “gobbledygook, jargon and misleading public information”.

They are announcing their annual awards on Tuesday 8th – both for best and worst examples of written communications. There is also a “Foot in Mouth” award, for “a baffling comment from a well-known person”. (Lord) Peter Mandelson and Britney Spears are both on the shortlist, and past winners include current Prime Minister Gordon Brown for a 1994 speech in which he covered …

… ideas which stress the growing importance of international co-operation and new theories of economic sovereignty across a wide range of areas, macro-economics, trade, the environment, the growth of post neo-classical endogenous growth theory and the symbiotic relationships between government and investment in people and infrastructures …

We could quote more but 45 words is probably enough of a taster and that sentence still has another 44 to go.

If it were not for the fact that he is a fictional character, Sir Humprey Appleby would have been a strong contender for a foot in mouth award. He was the permanent secretary who served Jim Hacker in the BBC comedy series Yes Minister (and later Yes Prime Minister as the hapless Hacker rose way beyond his natural level of competence).

In one episode, Hacker needs to know the identity of a civil servant who many years ago had made a decision that was now costing the government millions of pounds. The culprit is of course Sir Humphrey, but rather than say simply “It was me”,  (or even “It was I”) he embarked on this triumph of obfuscation:

The identity of the official, whose alleged responsibility for this hypothetical oversight has been the subject of recent discussion, is NOT shrouded in quite such impenetrable obscurity as certain previous disclosures may have led you to assume, but, not to put too fine a point on it, the individual in question is, it may surprise you to learn, one to whom your present interlocutor is in the habit of referring by means of the perpendicular pronoun.

I’d come across personal, possessive, relative, reflexive pronouns before, but perpendicular pronouns? Brilliant.

When you’re looking for a word that you’ve heard, or only half-remember having ever seen, it can be tricky using a paper dictionary. You might look up shedule, not realising that there’s a C involved; or if you want to make a clamour you might look for a claxon (though what you really need is a klaxon). Paper dictionaries can be rather unforgiving. You can spend as long as forever looking through the pages of words beginning with sh but to your great chagrin you won’t find the entry for chagrin.

Digital dictionaries, however, can be a boon. If you key in shedule to Macmillan Dictionary, it will redirect you to schedule. Key in shagrin, and it suggests chagrin.

Several visitors to the dictionary have tried to look up alledge or alledged, only to be redirected to allege or alleged. But you can see where they’re coming from. Edge, dredge, hedge, ledge, pledge, sedge, sledge all have the sound  /-edʒ/ and end in -edge. “Ah”, you might say. “They’re all monosyllabic, while allege has two syllables.” Well, looking at polysyllabic words, there don’t appear to be any that end in the sound /-edʒ/. There are a handful that are spelled –edge at the end (knowledge and its relatives, acknowledge, foreknowledge etc) but they all end with /-ɪdʒ/not /-edʒ/.

Other words that end in -ege have different pronunciations – sacrilege, privilege, college all end in /-ɪdʒ/; renege (/-eɪɡ/) rhymes with vague, and siege (/siːdʒ/) no longer sounds like French siège (if it ever did). Cortège still has its accent and ends in /-eɪʒ/ or /-eʒ/.

I’m not sure if anyone has ever asked the question “how many words in English end with the sound /-edʒ/ and have the spelling -ege?” but if they have, then the answer seems to be just one: allege.

Read more about common errors in English.