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.

This post contains a 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, language change, education in general, and language learning and teaching in particular.

Feel free to contact us if you would like to submit a link for us to include, or just add a comment to the post, with the link(s) you’d like to share.

Global English

The 10 most scandalous euphemisms
followed by:
20 of your favourite euphemisms

More on grammar
Much discussion of language, particularly on the web, goes nowhere because those involved are very often talking about different things. In considering approaches to language, as in all else, it’s important to be clear what we’re talking about. In particular, the word ‘grammar is bandied around without much thought as to what it might be.

Language change and slang

30 days of BuzzWords
A selection of BuzzWords from Mashables, including big data, synergy, second screen, and many many more…

Language teaching and resources

Are language teachers leading the way with education technology?
There are a plethora of possibilities for enhancing language learning with technology as there are colleagues willing to help from language fora and social media. The stumbling block for many is not having the time to seek out new tools and become familiar with them, as well as the fear of relinquishing control to their pupils who may be more techno-savvy than they are.

Books, science, dictionaries, words and languages

Your Brain Catches Grammar Errors Even When You Don’t Realize It
The brain does all kinds of amazing things while you’re not paying attention (you know, like regularly remind you to breathe). But it’s also engaged in less critical but equally interesting tasks, like correcting the grammar of the person sitting across from you at dinner. A University of Oregon study has logged hard evidence that the brain processes and compensates for errors in grammar and syntax without your being aware of it.

Video

Dictionary of Numbers: browser extension humanizes the numbers on the Web (0:58)
Dictionary of Numbers is a Chrome extension that watches your browsing activity for mentions of large numerical measurements and automatically inserts equivalences in real-world terms that are meant to clarify things. For example, a story about a 300,000 acre forest fire would be annotated to note that this is about the area of LA or Hong Kong; or that 315 million people is about the population of the USA.

Get your dancing shoes on – courtesy of Puma (2:45)
The brand collaborated with some of the most high-profile freestyle dancers from around the world and choreographer Super Dave to invent dance moves for 280 words (see behind the scenes photographs by Alex Hulsey below). The Dance Dictionary also includes a comprehensive inventory of dance moves and their definitions for freestylers.

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.

Browse the archive of Stories behind Words and get in touch if you’d like to share your story. We’d love to hear from you!

You may be familiar with the not-very-funny jokes based on the old formula “someone/something walks into a bar…”. They usually involve a play on words, as in ‘A drunk walks into a bar. “Ouch!” he says.’ Exactly – they aren’t very funny. But some of them make useful points about grammar:

A dangling modifier walks into a bar. After finishing a drink, the bartender asks it to leave.

This tells you exactly what a ‘dangling modifier’ (or ‘dangling participle’) is, and simultaneously exemplifies the problem, i.e that there is no clear grammatical subject – or ‘doer’ – of ‘finishing a drink’, so it dangles, or hangs there helplessly. The only possible candidate for subject is ‘the bartender’, but that makes no sense in light of the usual bartender-client narrative.

Joking aside, I heard this confusingly dangling participle on a radio news broadcast, and replayed the snippet several times to confirm that the reader really did say:

Police negotiated with him, minutes before being shot dead by marksmen.

Nonsense! ‘Police’ is the only available subject of ‘being shot dead’, which implies that they, not the armed gunman they’d been negotiating with, were shot dead by marksmen. The error must soon have been noticed and the script changed, because subsequent news reports did not repeat it.

It is often said that dangling participles make a sentence ambiguous, but in fact they make nonsense of it – they force the hearer/reader to construct a single, incorrect interpretation.

In contrast, there are sentences whose construction is perfectly ‘correct’ but whose grammar genuinely allows for two interpretations. In September 2011 The Independent newspaper reported that ‘giant crabs’ (‘up to a metre across’) have invaded deep waters on the edge of Antarctica, probably because of global warming, and are wiping out a large number of smaller marine species. The report goes on:

A team led by Dr Craig Smith from the University of Hawaii at Manoa found the crabs using a remotely operated submersible.

Fortunately for everyone concerned, these crabs were no cleverer than the average crustacean – it was obviously the team of researchers, not the crabs, who were using the submersible. Yet unlike the case of the dangling participle, there is nothing grammatically wrong with the alternative ‘smart-crab’ interpretation.

It is often argued that ambiguity and humour can be employed in the ELT classroom to brighten things up and make everyone smile. I was inclined to agree until I started writing this post, but now I’m less sure. The least sophisticated of readers can decipher the intended meaning of my example using a modicum of common sense and real-world knowledge. But what would I do if a student pressed me for a grammatical explanation?

I’d have to say that in its intended meaning, the sentence structure is ‘subject + verb + object + adjunct’. The adjunct (aka ‘adverbial’) ‘using a remotely controlled submersible’ is a free-floating clause and could move to the beginning of the sentence. In the sillier, more ecologically alarming interpretation, the structure is ‘subject + verb + object (although the analysis is actually trickier than this), and the clause ‘using a remotely controlled submersible’ is simply part of the pattern of the verb find, not an adjunct at all.

How complicated is THAT? The problem is that all grammatical explanations involve metalanguage – language about language – and ‘grammars’ vary widely, both in terminology and in the units of description they recognise. It would be dauntingly difficult to establish a common metalanguage with a class of non-native-speaker learners, who might not benefit much from the process anyway.

Moreover, if there’s anything worse than a bad joke, it’s a joke that you just don’t get. You look blank, still waiting for the punch line, until the joke-teller kindly takes on the grim task of dissecting it for you. By this time all humour has long since vanished.

While grammatical ambiguities are complex, it could be much easier to bring lexical ambiguity – based on different meanings of words – into the classroom. I mean, it wouldn’t be hard to discuss the various interpretations of, say, ‘He doesn’t usually wear his pyjamas out’, or ‘Go to work on an egg’. Would it?

This post contains a 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, language change, education in general, and language learning and teaching in particular.

Feel free to contact us if you would like to submit a link for us to include, or just add a comment to the post, with the link(s) you’d like to share.

Global English

Michael Gove and ‘correct grammar’: let me explain this slowly
… grammar is not a matter of being correct or not. It’s a way of describing how all language works. All linguists believe there is grammar, but linguists do not all agree on grammatical terms or categories. Pretending that there is only one correct way to describe language is confusing and untrue.

French academia in war of words over plan to teach in English
Socialist ministers accused of sabotaging French language by relaxing ban on English being used in French universities

Language change and slang

Word watcher charts marathon bombing’s description as ‘surreal’
With the rise of social media, it did not take long for “surreal” to spike in usage after the bombings. Along with “surreal,” other superlatives are often employed in the coverage of breaking news events.
Ben Zimmer … talks about the use of superlatives and other language trends.

Books, science, dictionaries, words and languages

Linguists identify 15,000-year-old ‘ultraconserved’ words
The 23 entries on the list of ultraconserved words are cognates in four or more language families. Could they sound the same purely by chance? Pagel and his colleagues think not.

English spelling is terrible. Other languages are worse.
The same factors that make English spelling so bizarre can also come into play in other languages. Some languages have pretty dodgy spelling. Some have even bigger challenges than English has.

Infographic

The Most Overused Buzzwords In Public Relations 2013
… an infographic that highlights some of the most overly used and disastrous buzzwords to ever hit a news story so you don’t get caught up in the ‘fluff’. Some of the biggest perpetrating buzzwords were ‘leading’, ‘dynamic’ and ‘low hanging fruit’!

Radio

Game of Thrones: Can you speak Dothraki? (4:46)
Mr Peterson told Today presenter Evan Davis that he invented the language after the creators trailed the programme with the actors speaking gibberish but “it sounded just awful”.

Video

The History of Typography – Animated Short (5:10)
A paper-letter animation about the history of fonts and typography.

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.

Browse the archive of Stories behind Words and get in touch if you’d like to share your story. We’d love to hear from you!

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?

This post contains a 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, language change, education in general, and language learning and teaching in particular.

Feel free to contact us if you would like to submit a link for us to include, or just add a comment to the post, with the link(s) you’d like to share.

Global English

Teaching in English creates problems for Danish universities
Danish universities are increasingly teaching in English in order to remain attractive to international researchers and students, but the development presents challenges for the teachers and students for whom English is a second language.

Our blog posts about:

• the ways in which different countries deal with the dominance of English
• the situation in Denmark

Language change and slang

English For Teenagers Infographic
Have you ever wondered how teenagers around the world use English? Kaplan decided to look at slang words used by teenagers and how English learners use text speak.

You’re Literally Up in Arms About ‘Literally’? Seriously?
The OED’s definition of “good” literally is, “Used to indicate that the following word or phrase must be taken in its literal sense”; that sense will be almost always be clear no matter how many times Joe Biden or Chris Traeger uses the word the other way. I searched Google News for “literally,” and 19 of the most recent 20 uses were literal and completely unambiguous …

Our post on the same topic: This will literally have you in stitches

Books, science, dictionaries, words and languages

Google search proves to be new word in stock market prediction
Mr Preis warned that the findings might not hold for future stock market movements. Revealing the predictive value of search data could change people’s behaviour, neutralising the effect shown by the analysis.

Trolls, memes and spam: author offers guide to web words
“One thing that is different about today, though, is the permanence offered by technology: the way in which billions and billions of digital words are not only preserved, but can remain searchable and accessible. Those keeping records – and wishing to study the histories of new words – have never had it so good, or indeed so overwhelming.”

The Oxford English Dictionary and its chief word detective
Oxford English Dictionary Chief Editor John Simpson is to retire after 37 years at the famous reference work. Here he writes of a life hunting for the evidence behind the birth of words.

Audio

BBC ‘Word of Mouth’: Accents Will Happen (28:00)
… Michael Rosen talks to those who love or loathe their accent; those who have managed to retain their accent and those who have changed the way they speak concluding with voice and dialect coach Charmian Hoare who works with actors and Vicky Carpenter who trains – well anyone and claims she can make you ‘accent-less’ …

New awards highlight bad grammar (8:51)
A new awards ceremony aims to highlight examples of bad grammar. Today’s programme’s Sarah Montague discusses ‘good’ grammar with Editor of The Idler magazine Tom Hodgkinson and Michael McCarthy, emeritus professor of applied linguistics at the University of Nottingham.

Video

Words, words, words (10 talks)
A selection of 10 TED Talks, from between 2002 and 2012, about (the power of) language.

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.

_______________

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.

Browse the archive of Stories behind Words and get in touch if you’d like to share your story. We’d love to hear from you!