This post contains a weekly selection of links related to language and words in the news. These can be items from the latest news, blog posts or interesting websites related to global English and language change, and language education too.

Do contact us if you would like to submit a link for us to include. We’d love to hear from you.

Global English

Pretty girls make men dumb
Inspired by Evan Frendo’s really interesting post on impression management (IM), I went hunting for research papers in the University of Pennsylvania’s online libraries.

Study of Oregon Latinos Finds Language Gap
A new OSU study of Oregon’s Latino residents shows that while first- and second-generation immigrants from Mexico or other Spanish-speaking countries maintain a Spanish-speaking dominance, English is dominant by the third generation. By the fourth generation, the study shows, any traces of Spanish language are almost completely minimized.

Losing campaign to fend off English
I rather sympathise with the French, who object to the fashionable embrace of English. It’s not new, of course. The Parisien beau monde adopted anglicisms like le gentleman, le redingote (riding coat), le snob and le fair play in the 19th century. In the 1950s dawn of le rock’n roll, people caught up on le hit parade during le weekend.

English-language skills taking off among pilots
Aviation leaders are reporting success with a decade-long push to make sure pilots and air traffic controllers around the globe are proficient in English – the official language of aviation worldwide.

Language change and slang

Q is for Quote marks
Quote marks, after all, are not innocent bystanders in the processes of text creation and interpretation. Traditionally, of course, they separated quoted matter from the writer’s own words. Hence, they’re called (variously) quote marks, quotation marks, speech marks and so on. But they’ve come to fulfill a number of other functions too.

Verbed!
The history of English, however, suggests that the language is remarkably flexible in terms of what can be verbed. Almost any word can be drafted to serve as a verb, even words we think of as eternal and unchanging, stuck in their more traditional roles. It’s easy to think of scenarios where “She me’d him too much and they broke up” and “My boss tomorrowed the meeting again” make sense.

Indian words in literary English
Tracking Indian words in English has been a favourite topic with columnists in the Indian media. This decade has seen the publication of new editions of dictionaries, and each one has added new words from Indian sources, borrowed either in India or in England.

Improve your English

Cartoon: Leaks
For weeks, we’ve been hearing about the  BP oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. […] Yesterday, however, a different sort of leak hit the headlines, when whistleblower website WikiLeaks published more than 90,000 classified war documents, painting a largely bleak picture of the war in Afghanistan.

Vocab Builder: A Way With Words
One of my favorite podcasts is “A Way With Words.” Martha and Grant are entertaining at answering callers questions about language, and AWWW is a great source of words. Here are a few I’ve picked up recently.

Books, words, science and the history of language

Wanting your life back
I want my life back feels to me like a recent coinage by somebody. (Of course, I could be wrong; I am reporting a mere intuition, which could be solely due to the recency illusion.) It is not a normal sort of phrase.

Negative stereotypes may affect both learning and performance
Negative stereotypes not only jeopardize how members of stigmatized groups might perform on tests and in other skill-based acts, such as driving and golf putting, but they also can inhibit actual learning, according to a new study by Indiana University researchers.

Video

Professor David Crystal discusses Global English (5:12):
Is control of English shifting away from British and American native speakers?

It seems there’s a new, and somewhat disturbing, wiki on the block – wikileaks.

Apparently a whistle-blowing website where sensitive material can be posted online in such a way as it to be untraceable, wikileaks has come to the nation’s interest amidst news of leaked details about the US military campaign in Afghanistan. (I say ‘apparently’, since I’ve been unable to access the site myself – it keeps timing out, probably due to too much traffic! – and so am basing this on The Guardian’s coverage of the incident.)

The word wiki, of course, relates to websites that can be added to and modified by users themselves, for example Wikipedia. We also now have  WikiAnswers, WikiMapia and wikibooks. Around the websites themselves, we see wiki communities (groups bound together by use of a wiki), wiki nodes (pages on wikis that describe related wikis), neighbour wikis (containing similar information or appealing to the same audience) and delegate wikis (sort of the next rung down the ladder in the information hierarchy). And then of course there’s wikiality – something which is deemed to be true simply because a lot of people believe it, rather than on the basis of any actual evidence.

In a similar sort of vein, we’ve seen hacktivist for someone who changes or manipulates information on someone else’s website, in order to get their own political views across (based, of course, on hacker), and rumint – intelligence information that comes from unreliable sources, especially rumours. (This latter I find worrying enough, without the thought of it then appearing on the web for any old nutter to act on!)

Whilst I like the basic wiki idea, I do find the latest addition to the stable pretty scary. Apparently, anyone can go onto the site and publish anything – national security information, state secrets – that they believe the public has a right to know. The White House has already condemned the site and accused it of putting the lives of military personnel at risk. The site’s founder defends it, saying the information was old enough to be of only ‘investigative’, rather than ‘operational’ significance, and that information is vetted before being published.

What the correct balance is between ‘need to know’ and ‘right to know’, I’m not sure, but I do go slightly cold at the thought of a random bunch of people sitting round a piece of web editing software making the decision, given that they don’t necessarily have access to all the information. Then again, even with (allegedly) all the information, those making the on-the-ground decisions don’t have the best track record, so maybe it’s not as bad as it seems.

Either way, wiki is proving to be a highly productive word, and its reach is steadily growing. Wikipedia alone lists more than 80 wikis, ranging from aviation safety information (SKYbrary) to ancient Chinese board games (Go). And I’m sure there’s plenty more to come.

This post contains a weekly selection of links related to language and words in the news. These can be items from the latest news, blog posts or interesting websites related to global English and language change, and language education too.

Do contact us if you would like to submit a link for us to include. We’d love to hear from you.

Global English

Michigan English
Now Michigan English is not all one thing, but there are surprising differences between the English used here and what you encounter in Ft. Wayne or London, Ontario, or Green Bay.

All immigrants face mandatory language test
Last month Ottawa made its language proficiency test mandatory for all skilled immigrant applicants, including native English and French speakers. The so-called “ministerial instructions” stipulate officials are not to process applications without language test results, starting June 26.

Language change and slang

Palin’s ‘Refudiate’ Not In The Dictionary
After the former Alaska governor noticed her mistake, or somebody told her about it, she deleted her tweet and retweeted the comments, switching ‘Refudiate’ with actual words, like ‘Reject’ and ‘Refute’.

Don’t be too quick to ‘refudiate’ new words
It takes about 20 years to know whether a word is going to stick, Metcalf says, and 40 to be sure.

In praise of jargon – a defence of the apparently indefensible
According to a YouGov survey, management jargon is choking the life out of meaningful communication in the workplace. Senior managers think it’s harmless enough but most employees want to see the back of it because they feel it creates barriers and misunderstandings at work.

Language teaching and resources

Unraveling English Language Teaching acronyms
One of the first things you may have noticed in this new career is the abundance of confusing acronyms, which you should know is basically one way long term practitioners have attempted to make language teaching more hip and yet more scientific/technical.

Improve your English

Data are or data is?
Is it singular or plural? It’s a word we use every day here on the Datablog – but are we getting it completely wrong?

A distinct difference
The difference between distinct and distinctive is subtle. Both words describe something that stands out, that is unmistakable for anything else. To understand the difference in use, we need to turn to the contexts in which the two words are used, to their collocational environment.

Books, words, science and the history of language

Foreign accents make speakers seem less truthful to listeners
Because an accent makes a person harder to understand, listeners are less likely to find what the person says as truthful, researchers found. The problem of credibility increases with the severity of the accent.

Stephen Fry to explore language in BBC series
Fry, who said language was one of “many passions”, added that he loved Anglo-Saxon words that were “just themselves, like ‘bundle’ – what a lovely word”.

Enid Blyton lingo gets an update
“Very subtle changes have been made to remove the barriers that stood between readers and the story.” In the original text, for example, Dick says: “She must be jolly lonely all by herself” which has been updated to read: “She must get lonely all by herself.” “Mother and father” become “mum and dad” and “school tunic” becomes ‘uniform’.”

American English month continues with a guest post by Denise Du Vernay. Denise has been teaching composition, literature, humanities, speech, and courses on The Simpsons for over ten years. She is co-author of The Simpsons in the Classroom: Embiggening the Learning Experience with the Wisdom of Springfield (www.simpsonology.com). Denise lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

__________

On the eve of its twenty-second season, The Simpsons deserves praise, not just for what it has done for television (you’re welcome, South Park and Family Guy fans), but it has also had an enormous effect on American popular culture and the English spoken in the United States. Several neologisms have become so ubiquitous that even non-fans of the show use words or phrases made popular by The Simpsons. They may not even realize that they have The Simpsons to thank for some of the things they say!

In linguistics, neologism refers to a newly coined term or meaning, and The Simpsons is to thank for many neologisms. Woohoo and d’oh, for example, were coined by The Simpsons through Homer. D’oh, an expression used when the speaker realizes he/she has done or said something stupid, is listed as a variant of doh in the OED, and two of the citations are attributed to The Simpsons. In the past years it has cropped up everywhere: it is often used on cable news networks in headlines and in error messages on popular websites. The expression woohoo is often used as a hashtag on Twitter to mark posts with a happy message. “Woohoo! As good as it gets!” appears when a user gives 5 stars to a business on Yelp.com. In several episodes, the word meh is used (to mean so-so), and its popularity has since taken off. In fact, the word is now included in some dictionaries with The Simpsons cited as the source.

It’s not just all about Homer. The writers of the episode “Lisa the Iconoclast” created the words embiggen (meaning “to make or become bigger”) and cromulent (meaning “fine, acceptable, legitimate”). In the following scene, two teachers are chatting at the back of a classroom during a film about the town’s founder, Jebediah Springfield:

Jebediah Springfield: [on film] A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.
Edna Krabappel: “Embiggens”? I never heard that word before I moved to Springfield.
Miss Hoover: I don’t know why. It’s a perfectly cromulent word.

Although cromulent and embiggen are not yet included in any standard dictionary, they are everywhere, frequently used by fans and non-fans alike. Many pop culture and encyclopedia sites, including aintitcool.com and Flickr, invite users to click small images in order to “embiggen” them and Tech Digest used it in a headline in May, 2009: “Embiggen Your iPod to 240GB and 42,000 Tracks.” A bookstore and art gallery called Embiggen Books is located in Queensland, Australia. The website for the Cromulent Shakespeare Company (Twin Cities, Minnesota) announces the company’s goal to “embiggen the Bard.”

Neologisms are often coined through blending (a blend is a new word created by combining two existing words together) and many new blends have been created by The Simpsons, including craptacular (a blend of crap and spectacular, from “Miracle on Evergreen Terrace”), which was used in The Wall Street Journal by journalist David Gaffen in September of 2008 (although he didn’t seem aware that he was using a blend already introduced by The Simpsons). Some other Simpsons-created blends that I hope have a future in American English are Euroific (a blend of European and terrific, from “Bart Carny”) and traumedies (a blend of trauma and comedy, from “Faith Off”). Chief Wiggum expects to be shot just days before retirement, saying that in the business it’s called retirony (which combines retire(ment) and irony and originates from “Homer vs. Dignity”).

Linguists have a lot to work with when looking at the ways The Simpsons uses language to create humor. Not just in its neologisms, as I’ve described, but also in its various examples of wordplay, including malapropisms (Homer is a known “xylophobe”*) and double meanings (in a bowling episode, newscaster Kent Brockman refers to Homer as a “local pinhead”**). The show provides layers in its humor and dialogue that makes a second (or third, or fourth) viewing of an individual episode not only fun, but rewarding, as we keep finding jokes we missed before. I’m grateful for the previous twenty-one seasons of The Simpsons, and look forward for the linguistic fun to come. What will the next Simpsons-inspired word added to the OED be? We’ll just have to wait and see.

Notes
* The word xyolophobe comes from Homer saying he supports the town’s “xylophobia” when he means xenophobia. His misuse of the word (and invention of a new one) causes both Ogdenvillians (neighboring townspeople) and xylophones to be banned from Springfield. (The episode is called “Coming to Homerica.”)
** Homer is called a pinhead, slang for a stupid person, by the newscaster. Because the episode is about bowling, this is a pun on bowling pins.

I recently bought a used car from auction and I have become enamoured of the specific vocabulary and euphemisms used when describing and discussing used cars. Buyers who are not au fait with this arcane language should beware, however, and I feel it my duty to publish this very necessary ‘guide’.

Type / condition of car:
My recently purchased car is about 10 years old and with no service history – as such it can be termed a dodgy motor, or at the very least an old banger. One hopes though, that at least it is not a ringer, a car that has been stolen and has been disguised as a legitimate vehicle; or even worse a cut and shut, a car that has been in a head-on collision and has had its undamaged rear-end welded to a different, undamaged front-end of the same model.

Make of car:
There are many makes and models of car and some of these have acquired their own soubriquets: Pug for a Peugeot; Beamer for a BMW and not forgetting the Dagenham Dustbin, a derogatory term for all Ford cars made in that area of London in the 1970s and 80s. I should say in Ford’s defence that they made some iconic cars during that period, not least the classic Ford Cosworth, workhorse of every self-respecting British police force and lovingly nicknamed the Cozzie.

Car parts:
Cars are, of course, complex machines and thus, second-hand buyers should be aware of the existing language for the various parts of a car. Here are a few of my favourites:

Term                          Part
anchors                       brakes
marshmallows          air bags
jugs                               cylinders
bidet                             rear wash/wipe system

A seller may sum up his car like this:

‘It’s got all yer marshmallows, plenty of ice, an’ a bidet in the back. You’ve got a big bore to keep the horses quiet and it stands well.’

Which translates as:

‘This car encompasses current safety features, in-car entertainment and a rear wash/wipe. The large exhaust can cope well with the powerful engine and the suspension is excellent.’

Once you have purchased your second-hand vehicle, you may adore it to such a degree that you feel it necessary to pimp it, meaning to add various modifications, extra lights and so on. Be careful though, go over the top and you’ll end up with a Kev car … see Sharon Creese’s blog for further clarification of this!

As part of American English month, we return to Philadephia, where blogger and EFL teacher & author Vicki Hollett discusses the hazards of a Brit speaking ‘merican. Thank you to Vicki for another great guest post!

_________

The US is a hazardous place for Brits. Since moving to Philadelphia, I’ve inadvertently commented on my hostess’s homely (=ugly) home; I’ve offended my gay neighbours by mentioning their fairy (=holiday) lights and I’ve even described the deceased at a funeral as having a wicked (=nasty – but not in Boston, where I might have been understood) sense of humour.

But there are lots of mistakes I’ve avoided. I’ve understood that batteries don’t go flat here (they die instead) and at the hardware store I’ve learnt how to ask for rawl plugs (=anchors) to put in the plasterboard (=sheet rock) along with some polyfilla (=spackle). I can now dress myself in trousers (=pants) with turn ups (=cuffs) and a jumper (=sweater – take it from me, ’merican jumpers are not a fashion item you’d ever want to wear). So I like to think I’ve had a lot of successes here. When I’ve written something wrongly, I’ve avoided asking my co-workers to lend me a rubber (=contraceptive). And when I’ve forgotten my alarm clock, I’ve never asked my travelling companions to knock me up (=get me pregnant) in the morning.

But whenever I open my mouth here, I’m conscious that it’s always a bit of an experiment. People think we speak the same language and they reason I know what I’m saying, but I don’t. The lexical differences are fun, but they’re actually small fry. Learning how to structure my thoughts ’merican-style is the biggest challenge for me.

The different styles of politeness are tricky. Putting it crudely, I come from a culture where politeness is mostly about not getting in anyone’s way, but in the US it’s more about awarding esteem. I have to remember to show approval, warmth and friendliness, and that’s tough for a Brit. If you think about it, the stereotypical Brit is aloof, standoffish and reserved. Our customs dictate we should leave people alone so they can go about their business without us getting in their way. Meanwhile the stereotype of the American is friendly and garrulous – someone who gives you a run-down of their entire life history within five minutes of meeting them. It’s just not polite to hold back, so I’ve had to learn to show more solidarity, share and be open.

It’s not that one form of politeness is good or bad, but they are different. Have you had any similar experiences with British/American differences? If so, please do share. And in my best British, I do hope I haven’t gone on too long and reading this hasn’t been a bother. And in my best ’merican, y’all come back sometime and set awhile, ye hear?

This post contains a weekly selection of links related to language and words in the news. These can be items from the latest news, blog posts or interesting websites related to global English and language change, and language education too.

Do contact us if you would like to submit a link for us to include. We’d love to hear from you.

Global English

On antinyms
Regular readers of this blog will recall a previous post about new words, one of which is bagonizing. We bagonized. All other passengers came, took up their bags and went, until eventually we were the only ones left at the carousel.

Beijing Renews English-Language Drive
Public servants in Beijing will face considerable pressure over the next five years to learn English after the city government launched a campaign to improve their language skills and penalize those who fail to meet expected proficiency levels.

Language change and slang

On Language, The Web Is At War With Itself
Internet memes and e-lingo are pumping new vitality into popular English parlance. But is it possible the Internet could also be stifling creativity in language? More on that in a moment.

Don’t forget to do the Meme Quiz!

‘Not a word’ is not an argument
Irregardless, supposably, ain’t, impactful, unfriend, defriend, disincentivise, signage, mentee, guesstimate, probletunity, orientate, loginned… Do these words make you twitchy? Would you say that some of them are not words? Disincentivise doesn’t fill me with thrills, but there’s no doubting its validity. Orientate is probably less reviled, but some people still reject its status as a word.

Language teaching and resources

Technology affecting English language in schools – Survey
Some teachers have complained about the poor performance of students in English Language examinations due to technology.

Improve your English

Words in the News: Losing One’s Touch
If you lose your touch, you can no longer do something as well as you could before.

How to Write Clear Sentences
Good writing is clear and concise and gets to the point. Readers don’t want to rummage through a messy verbal flea market to discover one or two sparkly gems of information.

Books, words, science and the history of language

Verbal cues improve visual detection
The study demonstrated that language can change what we see and can also enhance perceptual sensitivity. Verbal cues can influence even the most elementary visual processing and inform our understanding of how language affects perception.

When Did We First ‘Rock the Mic’?
Being a historical lexicographer in the 21st century is a task worthy of Janus, with one eye on the language’s past and another on new information about language that is emerging from advances in the digital world. So it was only fitting that my conference paper focused on how the Web is opening up previously unexplored terrain in documenting the history of American slang.

Did you understand the words and phrases at the end of yesterday’s post? They are a little tricky because they need a little cultural background:

Blogosphere refers to all blogs and their interconnections. The idea is that all blogs form a social network.

Maven comes from the Yiddish word meaning ‘expert’ or ’someone knowledgeable in a particular subject’. The word has been popularised by Malcolm Gladwell to describe individuals who influence large numbers of people. A good example is Gladwell himself though he unconvincingly denies this.

Meme is another term popularised by Gladwell; this one comes from evolutionary biology and is usually first attributed to Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene. A meme is basically an idea that quickly becomes popular as it spreads by imitation. An internet meme could be less grandly described as a rumour, though it also describes a commonly held idea. Political bloggers often use the word meme as a shorthand for topic.

Inside the Beltway comes directly from American politics. The Beltway is a ring road around Washington DC and something inside the Beltway is likely to interest political insiders but not the general public.

Inside baseball describes technical matters only of interest to specialists. Baseball references are commonplace in the blogosphere: a politician hits a home run or strikes out (while Californian criminals famously have three strikes or convictions before they get a mandatory life sentence). He/She is also wary of curve balls or attacks from unexpected directions.

More on the language of American politics in my next post. In the meantime, you can have a look around on this blog.

New technical terms are a source of great irritation to the casual reader. They are a way of creating an exclusive club of those ‘in the know’, what George Bernard Shaw called a ‘conspiracy against the public’. Nonetheless, new processes and ideas create the need for a new vocabulary to describe them.

Most online linguistic innovation originates in the USA – for obvious reasons. The USA is the epicentre of the web – by far the biggest and most influential producer and consumers of web content. As a result new words and phrases tend to draw on American cultural references. The three main sources are: politics, academia and sport.

Some of these terms – like blogosphere in the title of this post – are pretty self-explanatory. Others are mystifying. Do you know what a maven is? Or a meme? When something is inside the Beltway? Or inside baseball?

Answers in next post.

We have discussed collective nouns on this blog on a couple of occasions (see here and here). This time the emphasis is on differences between how British and American English speakers use them. This guest posts comes from Erin Brenner, author of The Writing Resource, a blog offering quick lessons in writing.

_________

A collective noun is a singular noun that refers to a group of individuals, animals, or objects, such as faculty, team, colony, staff, herd, and group. This is one of those points on which British and American English do not agree. In British English, the collective noun usually takes a plural verb:

The rugby team are practising night and day for the Rugby World Cup.
The staff are complaining loudly about the lack of overtime.

We Americans, however, usually pair a collective noun with a singular verb:

The football team is practicing night and day for the Super Bowl.
The staff is complaining loudly about the lack of overtime.

In these cases, we are thinking of these groups as singular units. The emphasis is on the whole, on everyone working in unison for one goal or expressing one thought. There are times, however, when we think of these groups as individuals:

Boston’s school committee disagree about what to cut from the school budget.
The faculty are preparing their courses for next year.

Here, individuals within the group are not acting as one. School committee members have conflicting ideas about how to reduce the budget. The faculty are working independently of each other to prepare coursework for the coming year.

Sometimes, though, a collective noun with a plural verb sounds odd to American ears:

The audience are fighting in the aisles.

In such a case, it is better to rewrite your sentence, e.g.:

Audience members are fighting each other in the aisles.

Grammatically speaking, there is no right or wrong answer here. A collective noun can go with either a singular verb or a plural verb. The choice is in what sounds right to your ear. Once you make that choice, however, be consistent throughout your text. Otherwise, your audience might indeed start fighting in the aisles.