Most verbal humour depends on some kind of mismatch between two words or phrases and the funny or unexpected resolution of this incongruity. My last post focused on a type of grammatical ambiguity that allows two conflicting analyses of a sentence, one of them ridiculous. More often, though, humour and ambiguity play on the multiple meanings of words and phrases, or on the clash between different phraseological interpretations.

For example, a recent headline in the Bristol Evening Post read:

PUPILS GO BACK IN TIME TO RECREATE EVACUATION

The article described how Bristol schoolchildren gathered at the headquarters of Avon Valley Railway to stage a re-enactment of the wartime evacuation of children from urban centres in the east to the Bristol countryside. The idea was to give modern kids a taste of what it was like for those other children to be suddenly taken from their homes and evacuated by steam train to an unknown rural environment.

For a moment, I ‘chunked’ this headline as follows: pupils + go back (‘return to school’) + in time to recreate evacuation (‘they weren’t too late for this’). A parallel ukWaC example is:

They arrived in time to catch the midnight train to London.

But this explanation of the headline is clearly ludicrous. The intended meaning involves a different grouping altogether: pupils + go back in time (‘return to an earlier period of history’) + to (‘in order to’) + recreate evacuation. A similar ukWaC example is:

Film crews travelled back in time to uncover historic facts on Coventry’s watch-making industry.

Road signs advising motorists to slow down, like SLOW CHILDREN AT PLAY and SLOW WORKERS AHEAD, are an easy target for deliberate mis-reading arising from conflicting ways of chunking the words: slow children + at play rather than the intended imperative slow + children at play. In practice, of course, the layout of such signs disambiguates them: SLOW is usually in a larger typeface and stands on a separate line.

Sometimes ambiguity occurs when there is both a phraseological and a word-by-word reading, as in this example (also from ukWaC):

She wore her shoes out dancing in the street.

The obvious reading of this sees wear out (sense 3) as a phrasal verb, while the less likely interpretation involves ellipsis – ‘she wore her shoes (when she went) out dancing’. Naturally, the possible ambiguity is resolved in the wider context.

Another kind of double meaning applies only to spoken English; it exploits the unrelated meanings of words that sound the same but are spelt differently, i.e homophones like their/there/they’re or sew/sow/so.

Sometimes the ambiguity lurking in homophones can fool you. Listening to a radio news broadcast once, I briefly but seriously believed that the newsreader said: Meat from Wales is being shipped to Japan and sold illegally. But he didn’t. Whatever I heard, his actual words were:

Meat from whales is being shipped to Japan and sold illegally.

This momentary confusion can be explained in terms of lexical priming. The juxtaposition of from Wales and to Japan reinforces my erroneous ‘two countries’ interpretation. Moreover, the noun group meat from whales is at odds with the way we normally talk about meat: we don’t often say ‘meat from lambs’ or even ‘meat from horses’, but lamb and horse-meat.

And finally, primings vary according to an individual’s life-long encounters with a word: I have strong personal and family connections with Wales but only a vague and theoretical relationship with whales. So there was no contest: this mysterious item had to be about Welsh meat. Except that it wasn’t.

In English, ambiguity also springs from homonyms – words that have the same spelling and pronunciation but different meanings. Road signs, again, often employ disconcerting homonyms (not intended to be puns) such as MAJOR WORKS AHEAD (to which the response can only be Does he?) and the oft-cited CAUTION – HEAVY PLANT CROSSING, which unfailingly invokes the mental image of a huge plant tiredly dragging its dusty leaves as it slowly makes its way across the tarmac. Everyday language is full of humour, if you want to find it.

My father, who was an exuberant talker and storyteller, used to conflate words, creating inadvertent coinages on the fly in the middle of a conversation or anecdote. He tended not to notice that he’d done it, but my brothers and I, and Mum, would pounce on them with glee.

One time he mentioned someone’s razier-like wit, presumably wit as sharp as both a razor and a rapier simultaneously. On another occasion he described a group of late-night revellers as legloose, a lovely, carefree, loose-limbed, slightly squiffy mixture of footloose and legless. Then there was interspinkled, which seems to incorporate elements of interspersed, sprinkled, and intermingled, to name but three. My favourite, though, has always been blagrant, as in ‘a blagrant lie’ or ‘a blagrant disregard for the law’, a highly satisfying combination of blatant and flagrant. I think what I like about it so much is that it seems so plausible. It sounds like it ought to be a word.

Linguistically, these would be described as blends, words formed by combining parts of two other words, like brunch (from breakfast and lunch) or the recent chillax (from chill and relax). But Dad’s versions weren’t deliberate coinages, they were simply happy accidents. Accidental or not, there’s a playful inventiveness about these made-up words that I really cherished when I was growing up, and still do. He did it naturally, like breathing.

Long before I became a lexicographer, I delighted in what you might call the joy of words: puns and other forms of wordplay, word puzzles, obscure words, made-up words. And I think blagrant (and those other curious lexical mongrels) may well be where it all started. I have wondered from time to time about sneaking blagrant in as a headword in one of the dictionaries I’m helping to write, and perhaps one day I will.

About Andrew Delahunty
Andrew Delahunty is a freelance lexicographer, dictionary editor, and reference book author. He has written and contributed to a wide variety of dictionaries and reference books, and 2013 marks the thirtieth anniversary of Andrew’s first day as a lexicographer.

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Our series on English as a lingua franca continues with a post from Japan. We asked Jim Ronald, Professor of English Linguistics at Hiroshima Shudo University, to provide a perspective on Japan’s engagement with English. Jim has discussed the subject with four of his students, and they give their views here.

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What impact is English having on Japan? In various ways, English is profoundly affecting the lives of people in Japan, although things are often different from how they may seem to a visitor to the country. As a long-term resident here, my experience of English in Japan differs from that of most Japanese people, so I asked my four graduate students, Eiji Takeda, Sae Asaoka, Miyu Yokota and Ryota Hiura to add their voices to this account.

Eiji Takeda tells of his British fiancée’s impressions when she first came to Japan:

“One of the things she was startled by was the flood of English writing in various places. She said, ‘I don’t know why you Japanese can’t speak English when it’s everywhere here.’ She was shocked to see little girls wearing T-shirts that said ‘touch me now’, ‘creature’ or ‘love child’, or a building in Tokyo just named ‘BIG BOX’. And when she saw the signboard of the little off-licence surrounded by beautiful green rice fields in my village, ‘Liquor Shop Urban’, she was lost for words.

Living in Japan, we are almost blind to all these English words that scream out confusing messages to her and to other visitors. We might gain a vague impression from them – something lovely or stylish or modern – but very few people would stop to read them and think what they mean.”

Two related issues that do directly affect many people’s lives are English proficiency tests and workplace requirements for English.

In Japan, there are many kinds of English proficiency tests. These days, above all, the business-oriented TOEIC test, produced by an American company, is considered an important tool for measuring people’s English ability, as well as for getting a job. As many as three quarters of companies now require specific TOEIC scores as a condition of employment or promotion. As Sae Asaoka says, “We often hear people, especially university students, say ‘I want to get a higher TOEIC score.’ I used to say something similar when I was an undergraduate, but now I’ve got a relatively high score, I feel different. For one thing, a high score does not mean that someone is good at communicating in English. People just want a high TOEIC score and there are plenty of books that help them do just that. But surely the important thing is not simply to get a high score, but to enjoy learning something you did not know, to study for your own growth, to study with the goal of becoming a good language user. Pursuing these goals – enjoying learning English and finding ways to communicate better – is surely more meaningful, and will also give us higher test scores. And really, what employers are looking for are people who can use English.”

Miyu Yokota points out that while some companies just see English in terms of a test score, others have gone a lot further. “International companies, such as the clothing company UNIQLO or Rakuten which specializes in Internet commerce, have adopted English as the official working language in their offices. They are already international companies and as they plan to expand and build more branches around the world, they need a global workforce, with English as the common language for the staff from many different countries. For Japanese people wanting to work in these companies, English is essential.”

Finally, Ryota Hiura looks at English in the world of popular music:

Many Japanese bands use English words in their names, and in their song titles and lyrics. It somehow gives a cooler image than Japanese. For example, Bump of Chicken is a well-known Japanese band, but most Japanese people have no idea what the name might mean. If we try to work out the meaning, it could be about cowardice or maybe goose pimples. In either case, if this were expressed in Japanese it would sound old-fashioned or somehow frumpish. And English names like these are far from exceptional. In a recent local festival of up-and-coming bands, around 50 of the 55 bands’ names include some kind English – usually a deliberately wacky kind. It seems that a band’s name almost has to be in English in order to appeal to a young Japanese audience, but at the same time this restriction does seem to enable the freedom to be creative and playful… Here, to finish, are a few more entertaining examples of bands’ names, including their creative grammar, word breaks, and capitalization: the band apart, Hello Sleepwalkers, TOTALFAT, Scott goes for, another sunnyday, overthedogs, Indigo La End, and zippy ZIPPER.”

A big thank you to everyone who took part in our “Say the Word” competition.

The brief was to find any words in Beatles songs which are not ‘red words’ in the Macmillan Dictionary. And this isn’t easy. We mentioned in an earlier post that the Beatles’ lyrics are mostly made up of basic, high-frequency English words. As we often point out, Macmillan’s 7500 red words – the core vocabulary of English – provide most of the vocabulary you need in order to understand just about any kind of text. On average, something like 93% of the words you’ll come across in a novel, newspaper, or academic textbook belong to the 7500 most frequent English words. This means that spotting the ‘black’ (or low-frequency) words in any text is by no means straightforward – and it gets a lot more difficult when we’re talking about pop songs. Most of the Beatles’ early songs have very simple lyrics, and even on the later Abbey Road album, over 91% of the words belong to the top 2000 in frequency terms (which would make them 3-star red words in the Macmillan Dictionary).

So we’re enormously impressed by all the entries in our competition. Finding even 20 ‘black words’ in the Beatles catalogue would be quite an achievement. But many of you did far better than that, and the winning entry lists well over 200! So well done to everyone who’s entered!

Here are the results:

The winner of the competition is …  Alejandro Pinto-Núñez with more than 220 correct entries!

Great work, Alejandro! You have won £30 in vouchers for the Macmillan eBookstore.

There were several entries that were also impressive and deserve a mention:

Arianna Basaric is in second place, with more than 180 correct entries. Nelson Cabral, Drina Di Benedetto and Kim Alison Wegener also submitted a long list of around 100 black words – well done to you all!

As non-academic and uncool as it may sound and after a few hour glasses of thought, my chosen phrase is going to have to be eye of the tiger.

It has become a phrase that is so frequently used in the confines of my immediate family that it’s simply become part of the furniture, part of our natural lexicon, part of the fabric of how we all communicate. Like a family cat that lives far beyond its life expectancy, eye of the tiger’seems to have unexpectedly been kept alive at every opportune moment. Be it job interviews, weddings, gigs, presentations, house offers, court cases, funeral eulogies, it just seems to come out instinctively in text messages, emails, voicemails and even in person.

My old man was a huge fan of the Rocky films and he tried his best to emulate the look. He bought a grey all-in-one tracksuit and would run around the house shouting ‘Adrien’. The only problem was my Dad was and still is a rather petite man. He’s more Leonard Cohen than Silvester Stallone but with a small sweat patch just above his chest he was able to dream …

It was this love of the Rocky films that got my Dad using this phrase and for my brother, sister and I it would be said to us before school sports matches and exams. It is a phrase we remember from our childhood that has become synonymous with a Dad who was always there at every juncture in our life. To us it meant: have no fear and go for it with everything you have. Somehow that phrase has become a family heirloom and although as corny as can be, it represents how much we all love each other!

About Luke Vyner
Luke Vyner is a Macmillan author and language teacher. He also runs an audio production and course design company, London Language Experience. His approach to teaching and writing is strongly influenced by a background in theatre and song writing. With interests in literature, cinematic audio, storytelling and drama techniques, Luke strives to make his educational work contemporary, creative and engaging.

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New vocabulary appears constantly: we invent words, or more usually modify existing ones, to meet the needs of expression – or just for fun. Sometimes, too, existing words get repurposed, switching grammatical classes or incorporating new ones: verbs and adjectives are converted into nouns, and vice versa. This attracts predictable criticism, but it’s a thoroughly ordinary process; nounings and verbings are a large part of the everyday formation of new usages.

Other switches are more unusual. Anne Curzan at Lingua Franca recently reported that her students are using the word slash in innovative ways. In lines such as “I need to go home and write my essay slash take a nap”, what began as a punctuation mark (“/”) has become, of all things, a coordinating conjunction. These constitute a very narrow class, and the arrival of a new one is rare indeed.

What’s more, slash is showing up at the start of sentences to set off a new topic or angle, as in: “I really love that hot dog place on Liberty Street. Slash can we go there tomorrow?” (again from one of Curzan’s students). These migrations are significant and surprising. Curzan compares the emergence of slash as a new function word to “a rare-bird sighting in the world of linguistics”.

Another recent grammatical change is the transformation of LOL. In a casual reply like “lol, i hear you”, actual laughter is probably not occurring. What began as an abbreviation meaning “laughing out loud” (or “lots of love”) is losing this explicit meaning and now frequently serves as a pragmatic particle marking empathy and a shared frame of reference, according to linguist John McWhorter.

Something similar, McWhorter says, has happened to the phrase (Do) you know what I’m sayin’? – it isn’t really the question that it superficially appears to be, but rather is “a piece of grammar, soliciting the same sense of empathy and group membership that LOL does”. Given its frequent informal use, the phrase is often compressed into a syllable or two for efficiency. If you search Twitter for nomsayin or knowmsayin, you’ll see how common this is.

Grammatical innovations can be subtle, but they play a long game. Compared to new vocabulary, they represent deeper modifications to the structure of a language. Whatever their particular source, and whether or not they spread to standard use, they signify a language in good health. And the more useful they are – the more functionally they slot into niches in our daily lives – the more likely they are to catch on. Knowmsayin?

Today’s guest post comes from Janet Byron Anderson. Dr. Anderson is a medical editor and runs Medical Linguistics Consulting. Her book Sick English: Medicalization in the English Language is available at Amazon.com.

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If you’re of a certain cast of mind and want to know your prospects for life, death, and happiness you can open your hand and a palm reader would tell you. “Hmm, the girl you’re dating will break your heart because you’re a pushover”. “You’ll go bald next year”. Often the more you hear, the more your palm sweats.

Now you can skip all that. A bit of sweat gleaned from your palm can be whisked to a laboratory, where cells in the sweat would undergo gene reading. You would have your DNA sequenced, and from the findings you may infer what experiences you’re likely to have in the future.

DNA is in everyone’s vocabulary now, as Michael Rundell reminded us in his recent intriguing post. DNA is as common an abbreviation as GDP, and just as technical. But whereas most speakers know that GDP stands for gross domestic product, it’s doubtful that a typical speaker knows what DNA stands for. And if you gave them its full name, deoxyribonucleic acid, they might have a difficult time disgorging this 10-syllable monstrosity.

As Michael pointed out, if you say that a particular quality is in someone’s DNA (or in their genes), you mean that this quality defines that person and isn’t likely to change. In his memoir My Nine Lives (an intriguing feline metaphor), the classical pianist Leon Fleisher reflected that if you’re a budding soloist you should tackle difficult repertoire early in your career, so that the difficulty would penetrate your fingers and “your DNA” (Fleisher 2010). Corporations, which nowadays view themselves as human, have also discovered that they’re genetically endowed. A U.S. historian, opposed to what he viewed as an authoritarian management style in the world’s largest retailer, insisted that a “patriarchal ethos was written into the Wal-Mart DNA” (Lichtenstein 2011).

DNA and genes belong to a large set of technical terms which have migrated from the specialized field of biomedicine into our homes – and once there, they have turned metaphorical. Other expressions include comatose (e.g. “comatose careers”), autistic (e.g. “autistic architecture”), cancer (e.g. “the cancer of corruption”), syndrome (e.g. “bigger towel syndrome”), and many more. I researched these metaphors in news reports from the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. The results are summarized in my book Sick English: Medicalization in the English Language. I use the term “Sick English” to denote the entire set of new clinical metaphors that began to proliferate in the last century.

The term medicalization reflects the sociological underpinning of this linguistic trend. It refers to the tendency of Westerners to speak of uncomfortable or embarrassing experiences (e.g. menstruation, male pattern baldness) in the language of pathology, even in the absence of clearly diagnosed disease. A medicalized mentality often drives people to seek medical treatment in order to deal with normal feelings and sensations of discomfort. Most observers of this trend deplore medicalization, believing that it strips people of inner strength and autonomy, and makes them overly dependent on the medical establishment and the drug industry.

Realizing how faithfully language reflects society and its dominant modes of thinking, I decided to explore the linguistic aspects of medicalization.

Clinical metaphors aren’t new. Once they’ve become naturalized in everyday language, speakers no longer recognize them as medical terms: consider plethora or jaundiced, for example. For the most part the newer metaphors seem innocuous. Occasionally, though, their use can backfire. In one example, a French minister described the political stance of the British government as “autistic”, causing some vexation. If real people, many of whom we know, are suffering from a condition that’s prevalent in our age (e.g. autism, cancer, dyslexia), metaphorical use of the clinical terms has the potential to cause offence. Nevertheless we’re usually able to enjoy hearing and even using most of the new metaphors because their dark underbelly, namely the medicalization of Western society, is obscured.

References
Dr. Janet Byron Anderson, Sick English: Medicalization in the English Language, 2012.
Leon Fleisher, My Nine Lives: A Memoir of Many Careers in Music, New York: Doubleday, 2010.
Nelson Lichtenstein, “Wal-Mart’s authoritarian culture”, The New York Times, 22 June 2011.

Back in early 1997 I was working as an English teacher in Quito, Ecuador. My family were over there with me and my daughter – Aliz – would have been 5½ at the time. I don’t think I’m any different from other English language teachers in being fascinated by the way our children pick up languages. I would spend ages listening to my daughter amazed at the words and expressions she used, thinking about the grammar and the order she was acquiring things.

At the time her favourite video was Pocahontas and whenever we were walking down to the shopping centre or the park she would retell the story. It always made me laugh as she would start by saying “So John Smith went into the forest and then Pocahontas went into the forest. And then they met under the talking tree. And then …” it seemed as though the only conjunction she knew was ‘and then’ so I’d always butt in by saying ‘and then’ at the wrong points

And then (you see it’s catching) one day we were walking across Parque La Carolina, the big park just down the road from our apartment. I guess from one end to the other was easily 3 kilometres, so quite a long walk for a young child. Aliz had her head down, trudging along recounting Pocahontas for the millionth time when suddenly she paused, looked up at me and said, “Dad. My feet are killing me!” I was stunned. Here was a five-and-a-half-year-old using an idiom perfectly – at this time she still made mistakes with syntax, irregular past verbs (making them regular), past perfect etc and yet she could use an idiom in exactly the right way. I laughed so loud that my sides were killing me!

About Adrian Tennant
Adrian works as a freelance teacher trainer, writer and consultant. He’s worked on a wide range of courses including Global, Straightforward, New Inspiration and Attitude as well as lots of materials for onestopenglish.com. In his free time he loves reading, swimming and cooking, but usually not at the same time! You can find out more about him at his blog.

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If you had asked me as a teenager what a stakeholder was, I might have guessed “assistant vampire killer”. Why else would you hold a stake, after all? But of course the word is less literal than that – the stake in stakeholder is the degree to which someone is involved in something, financially or otherwise.

Nowadays I often encounter stakeholder; it returns thousands of hits on the Irish Times and Guardian websites, for example, and I see it regularly when editing academic prose and business or non-profit reports. In the US its domain is more confined, appearing in academic contexts about 85% of the time, according to COCA.

Macmillan Dictionary’s definition tags stakeholder as a business word and says it’s either “a person or company that has invested in a business and owns part of it”, or “someone who has an interest in the success of a plan, system, or organization, for example a worker in a company or the parent of a child at a school”. It’s the second, more general sense that’s more familiar in my experience.

Many of the words that commonly modify stakeholders – such as various, different, multiple, diverse, and a range of – convey the breadth of views that have to be taken into account with regard to some organisation or development. Other collocating adjectives, such as key, relevant and major, indicate a hierarchy of involvement: for some stakeholders there is more at stake.

A Google Ngram graph of the word in singular and plural forms shows how recent is its growth in popularity: hardly ever used until the late 1970s, at which point it rose steadily for a decade and then climbed even more rapidly. The Corpus of Historical American English shows a similar curve: no tokens at all from 1800 to 1980, then a sudden surge.

Though its popularity suggests it’s a useful addition to the general vocabulary, stakeholder is not universally liked. In a recent article criticising management jargon, Steven Poole described it as “plump with cheaply bought respect”, and indeed it featured in my parody of corporate language here a couple of years ago, where I mentioned “operation-centric initiatives push[ing] stakeholders’ imagination buttons”.

Our own Michael Rundell has an “enduring hatred” of stakeholder owing to negative initial exposure, as he revealed in a comment on Gill’s post about issues around. The same antipathy – or at any rate ambiguity – in regard to stakeholding may be seen in a profile of British politician David Miliband that says he is “credited, or blamed, for inventing the term ‘stakeholding’.”

So the jury is still out. Does stakeholder push your imagination button, or would you rather drive a stake through it?

While not having one specific influence on the way I think or work, the word (and plant) dandelion is one that has accompanied me all my life.

When I was small, my grandmother taught me and my sister how to tell the time by blowing the seeds of a dandelion clock. Although the method was not very scientific, it was enough fun for us to make it want to work. So, instead of counting the amount of puffs it took to blow all the seeds away (which was how we were supposed to do it), we varied the strengths of our puffs so that if we knew for example that it was three o’clock, we blew all the seeds off in three strong puffs. We were encouraged to do this in the field and the park, but not in our grandmother’s garden.

In my early 20s, while studying herbal medicine, I was chuffed to find out that the name dandelion comes from a mispronunciation of the French Dente de Lion, literally ‘lion’s tooth’. Look at the shape of the leaves, and it will be obvious how it got this name. Even more relevant to a budding phytotherapist, was finding out that the French give this diuretic plant another more vernacular name: pisse en lit. Where I live now, the plant’s name in the local German Swabian dialect is: Bettsoicherle. Both of these folk-names mean the same thing in English, and that is ‘wet the bed’. Be aware of this next time you drink a pot of dandelion tea before bedtime!

These days, as a garden-owner, I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with dandelions. On the one hand, when they appear in bright abundance, they herald the beginning of summer; on the other hand, if we don’t keep them under control, their incredible root system and seeds will enable them to take over the garden in a very short time. So we dig some dandelions out, we leave some in to flower, but no one is allowed, at least within the boundaries of the garden, to blow their pretty fluffy seeds off the top of the stalk and tell the time with a dandelion clock.

About Karen Richardson
Karen Richardson is a freelance teacher, teacher-trainer, and ELT materials writer based in Germany, who (amongst other things) writes the Guardian Weekly and Business Spotlight news lessons on www.onestopenglish.com.

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