English has a variety of options for when we want to express contrition or remorse. We can say we’re sorry, we apologise, we regret something. We can emphasise it by saying ‘I’m so/very/really/truly/awfully sorry’, and so on. Or we can just say ‘Apologies’.

Convention dictates in part how this and other ritualised speech acts take place. We generally say ‘Congratulations’ or ‘Congrats’, though ‘I congratulate you’ might begin a longer, formal utterance. With its jocular tone, ‘Greetings’ is fairly common in everyday encounters with friends or family, or in comic situations like ‘Greetings, Earthling’; it works less well when we meet someone for the first time. We say ‘Thank you’ or ‘I appreciate it’ rather than ‘Gratitude’ or ‘Appreciation’, as if these more personal expressions warrant mention of whoever is speaking or being addressed.

‘Apologies’ is an interesting case. It can be perfectly sincere, albeit often quite a formal way of acknowledging a mistake. At other times it strikes me as an offhand approach for speakers to appease injured parties without actually saying sorry. Something like: ‘Apologies are taking place. Look closely and you might spot them.’

Being sorry is about far more than just saying the words, of course. Authentic remorse tends to be effectively communicated so long as sincere effort is made through tone, gesture, penitent behaviour and so on. But the words, as an explicit admission of wrongdoing or shortcoming, can be an important part of reconciliation. Not counting instances of extreme sarcasm.

Because it omits the subject, ‘Apologies’ is somewhat disembodied and abstract, a bit like saying ‘Mistakes were made’ instead of ‘I/We made a mistake.’ It can be personalised, for example as ‘My (sincere) apologies’, but this feels formal – at least to me – whereas ‘I’m sorry’ does not. Omission of the subject is why the passive voice is not best suited to apologising: it is, as Lane Greene writes at Johnson,

the most straightforward way, syntactically speaking, for a coach, boss or bureaucrat to seem to be admitting something went wrong while not putting themselves, or any other human, on the line.

A Yahoo! Answers user named CeltAngel made an interesting distinction between ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘Apologies’:

Where I grew up you said “I’m sorry” when you were genuinely sorry for what you did – such as knocking into someone (or anything more severe). When you really weren’t sorry, or were sorry the other person reacted to your action in the way they did, you would tender “apologies”. It’s kind of a snarky distinction, but it was a very stuffy, polite society I grew up in. Semantically speaking, there is really no difference.

She’s right that there’s no semantic difference, or not much anyway, but there is a pragmatic one. Sometimes sorry really does seem to be the hardest word. (Sorry, Elton.)

What’s your take on these ways of apologising – is ‘Apologies’ more offhand or distant than ‘I’m sorry’, or does it depend mostly on how you say it? What makes them distinct?

The Eurozone crisis claimed another victim on 6 May when Nicolas Sarkozy became the eleventh European political leader to lose his job since 2008. His opponent, François Hollande, has become only the second socialist president of the French Fifth Republic. This change of presidency has been seen by some as a “lurch to the left”.

Meanwhile, in the UK, “David Cameron is facing pressure from Conservative MPs to “lurch to the right” following his party’s disastrous results in the local elections” according to heraldscotland.com.

But why left, why right?

In common with many frequent words, the words left and right have more than one meaning. As well as referring to the side that is east when you are facing north, right can also mean, among other things,  “correct”, “morally correct”, “immediately” or “completely”.

Left is not quite so rich – apart from its directional meaning, it is the past tense and past participle of the verb to leave. But both words are used to signify a particular political position.

If we want to know why François Hollande should represent the “left” and David Cameron the “right”, we have to go back over 200 years, to the Assemblée Nationale in France round about the time of the Revolution in 1789. The members sat then (as they still do today) in a semicircular chamber, facing the president of the Assembly. The position of honour was on the president’s right and was occupied by the nobles, while to his left were the commoners. Politically, the nobles were staunch supporters of the church, the king and the existing constitution, while the commoners were more likely to be anti-church, anti-royalist and in favour of overthrowing the constitution. In between them sat the moderates. So the right came to represent those political parties that favour continuity and stability (as they see it) while the left represents radical parties of change.

In the UK, such a distinction could not have been made, as the elected representatives sat facing each other in an adversarial configuration, and although the Speaker has the governing party on his or her right and the opposition on his or her left, the disposition of these parties will depend on who is in government at any one time. And in fact, it wasn’t until about 1906 that the terms left and right started being applied to British politics, when the Labour Party became a third force in national politics, joining the previously duopolistic Conservatives and Liberals to create more of a political spectrum.

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

What exactly is hand-shredded ass meat?
The Beijing Municipal government hopes to end unintended jokes with its new guidebook intended for the public and restaurants alike, “Enjoy Culinary Delights: The English Translation of Chinese Menus.”

Language change and slang

Rise of the twitchfork mob: how to civilise the web
Gawker founder Nick Denton declared at the South by Southwest festival in March that the dream of online comments – not just on social networking sites but also on news and blog sites – as a forum for intelligent debate was dead.

Improve your English

‘Scary quotes’
Scary quotes commonly appear in headlines and subheadings. Some indicate reported speech or text, a common function of quotation marks; others paraphrase.

The Verb “Do” Is Weirder Than You Think
You might not have given much thought to how many jobs “do” does, and how unusual it is, so today we’re going to give “do” its due.

Language teaching and resources

The Rotary Sushi Bar of English
Luke Thompson challenged himself to talk for 30 minutes. He ended up talking for 1 hour. Mostly about food.

Books, words, languages and dictionaries

Cajun Fench: Can dying language be saved?
Learning a second language can be a hobby or an attempt to reconnect with one’s roots. But for these students, there’s another goal: To save a dying local language.

DARE celebrates completion at ‘shindy’
At the party were [original editor] Cassidy’s children and grandchildren, as well as four of DARE’s original field workers, who were sent across the country to conduct interviews and gather the words that would eventually comprise the dictionary.

Omphalopsychites and umbilicani
I’ve heard the phrase navel gazing exactly a million and one times, without ever suspecting that it had once been more than a figure of speech. I thought that it merely involved contemplating yourself, and a particularly uninteresting part of yourself at that.

Video

History of the English language
This is a real period piece, a British Council film about the history of English. The film was made in 1943, in the middle of World War Two, which explains why the section about vocabulary of German origin is illustrated by a military arm bearing a swastika. Worth a look nonetheless.

Gill Francis is a freelance language consultant and writer of resources for teachers and learners of English.  Her latest project is Skylight, an easy-to-use online corpus access tool (for login details, email gillian.francis@blueyonder.co.uk).

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When someone says ‘preposition’ and ‘language change’ in the same breath, you would be forgiven if your eyes glaze over. Prepositions are ‘grammar’ words, and grammar doesn’t change much, surely – or at least not in interesting ways.

If that was your first reaction, it may be because you were taught that prepositions, like pronouns, conjunctions, and determiners, are ‘closed classes’ whose members are definitively listed in grammar books (preferably unopened). Prepositions seem uninteresting because they mean very little out of context; they have uses rather than meanings, to put it simply. In context, their changing ways can be fascinating.

True, new grammar words don’t burst onto the stage with all guns blazing, like some ‘lexical’ words do. So-called ‘open-class’ words – particularly nouns and adjectives – are often coined or dug up by journalists when the situation demands it, like omnishambles in the aftermath of the last UK budget. Omnishambles may make its way into the dictionary, or more probably it will sink into oblivion once the narrative that spawned it is forgotten. In general, new ‘lexical’ words and compounds are coined as and when needed, to name new objects and concepts. For example, not long ago we might have been mystified by this supermarket product description: fairly traded party size instant barbecue (printed without any hyphens), which now causes only fleeting puzzlement.

New uses of ‘grammar’ words enter the language more gradually and without attracting much attention. This may be because the words themselves are not newly-minted or revived; instead, the same familiar little items are being drafted into new areas, annexing part of the territory of other members of their set.

Look at the preposition across in the next example, from The Archers, a UK radio soap. Two characters are discussing an upcoming event at a local venue (May 2011):

Elizabeth: The models arrive at about 4.30.
Roy: And … they’ll need refreshments?
Elizabeth: Yeah, but Hugh’s across all that.

Only a few days later, another Archers character, unable to access the website of a secondary school to which he considers entrusting the education of his offspring, grumbles:

“It doesn’t bode well if the school’s not even across basic technology.”

This sense of across is equivalent to the more formal conversant with, au fait with, aware of, familiar with, etc. More informally, we say things like I’ve got the hang of it or I’m clued up on this; we choose the level of formality according to the situation.

The ‘new’ use often occurs in the broadcast media and in conversation, but it does not (yet?) appear in any dictionary of Standard English (as far as I know). And I have found no evidence in large recently-compiled corpora, perhaps because there simply is no evidence, or because I haven’t spotted it amongst the hundreds of thousands of matches for this very common word.

Further support for this use of across is that has acquired its own unique collocations and phraseology. For example, it co-occurs with the modifiers very and absolutely, as in the next examples. (In the more usual senses of across, these modifiers are not used; we don’t say very across the road.)

He’s very across all the issues in international development… (Lenny Henry, BAFTA Awards ceremony, May 2011)
He would be absolutely across everything we have today. (Mark Gatiss on Sherlock Holmes, Radio 5, June 2011)

Finally Snowmail (an internet preview of Channel 4 News) informed its readers (April 2012) that Simon Israel is astride the latest on a particular controversy – a jokily inventive variant of across that sounds uneasily physical in the light of astride’s usual collocates in the domains of horse-riding, cycling and motorcycling.

Across is just one example of the ways in which prepositions are straying into new territory. Further investigation is needed into developing senses, the pragmatic information you need about them, and the detectable trends that link them together in their uncertain journey towards the dictionary.

The Pennsylvania-based artist and illustrator, Victor Stabin has sent us a copy of his delightful book Daedal Doodle. It’s an ‘ABC’ for kids learning the alphabet – but with a difference. Books of this type usually employ familiar objects and animals (‘A is for Apple, B is for Bear’ and so on), but this one is based on rare words which Stabin discovered by scouring dictionaries to find unlikely pairs. These produce bizarre alliterations, accompanied by surreal illustrations. Each picture is helpfully provided with definitions – which is just as well because even lexicographers wouldn’t know most of the words being illustrated. Two of the less obscure examples are bifoliated bonito (a fish similar to a tuna, with two leaves – you can find it here), and microcephalic minotaur (the mythical creature with a bull’s head on a man’s body, but in this case with an abnormally small head). The whole approach is counterintuitive, but that’s what makes it interesting. Stabin has used this technique in schools, encouraging students to comb their dictionaries in order to find their own outlandish combinations and then draw pictures of them. By a strange coincidence, his first high-school assignment was in a class of 26 students, so they each worked on one letter of the alphabet.

Only a handful of the 50-odd words illustrated here appear in the Macmillan Dictionary – though we do have zygote, traditionally the last entry in most English dictionaries, which is paired with zooid in Daedal Doodle. This demonstrates both the vast range of English vocabulary (something we’ve discussed before), and the point that most of us, most of the time, get by pretty well with just a fraction of the available resources. It’s all about frequency: microcephalic, for example, occurs just 25  times in our 1.6-billion-word corpus, which makes it an exceptionally rare word. (Though, intriguingly, one of these 25 examples very nearly connects microcephalic with the minotaur: “Professor Henneberg has previously compared the remains against a microcephalic Minoan skull dating from 2000 BC.”)

It brings us back to the old question of how words get in the dictionary. The strict ‘entry criteria’ we traditionally applied made perfect sense in the days of paper dictionaries: if you added a new item, something else would usually have to go in order to make room for it, so words like microcephalic didn’t stand much chance of getting into a general-purpose dictionary. But with dictionaries now mainly in digital form, we find ourselves revisiting most of the conventional wisdom that guided us in the past. With unlimited lexical data at our disposal, and crowd-sourcing to complement our own lexicographic efforts, maybe one day children reading Daedal Doodle will be able to check the Macmillan Dictionary for its definitions of the picture illustrating the letter N: ‘nidus naga’s nucivorous nidicolous’.

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

Tidbits and titbits
Americans do not say tidbit because they would titter at BrE titbit. Americans say tidbit because that’s the original form of the word.

Have you ever been out swarping around?
I mentioned this expression to a middle-aged friend and he smiled and said he hadn’t heard it since his grandmother used it to scold him as a teenager.

Language change and slang

Swedish hens and singular ‘they’
A few parts of speech admit new members readily: verbs and nouns and adjectives are successfully coined all time. But the bits of grammatical plumbing like conjunctions, prepositions and pronouns don’t admit much innovation.

Old Spice Ad Campaign Tries to Make ‘Smellf’ Happen
Can Old Spice make “smellf” happen? We don’t expect to adopt this word into our vocabulary, but it might draw a slight chuckle each time we hear it.

Improve your English

The overuse of exclamation points!
For those who are missing the Waterstones apostrophe, here’s a little rant about exclamation marks.

Language teaching and resources

Quickworksheets: Create Vocabulary and grammar Worksheets Online
There are plenty of free online worksheet generators available, but most of them are cluttered with ads, and I couldn’t find any that are as well-designed and easy-to-use as Quickworksheets. The variety of worksheet types available is impressive.

Books, words, languages and dictionaries

How do you sign a local word like durian?
A video dictionary has been developed to show how the deaf can use sign language to describe local icons such as durian and Marina Bay Sands.

What is the worst of all words?
I remember as if it was yesterday the thrilling English lesson when my class teacher wrote the words nice, get, and got on pieces of paper and set fire to them, to impress upon our 10-year-old brains that we should choose more interesting words for our writing. This writer had a similar – if slightly less inflammatory – experience.

Despite its popularity and contagiousness, linguistic inflation is strongly resisted in some contexts. You’re unlikely to read ‘totally epic’ in a philosophy book, ‘unbelievably amazing’ in an academic essay, or ‘Best. Results. Ever.’ in a scientific paper. But in other, less formal contexts, inflation thrives; one such place is real estate language.

In this world, medium is ‘large’, average is ‘first rate’, and unusual is ‘extraordinary’. Any site that isn’t a ruined shack sinking into a swamp may be described as ‘superb’. A well-maintained building is ‘stunning’ and ‘fabulous’, a better-than-average view ‘must be seen to be believed’, and everywhere but the most dilapidated neighbourhoods are in a ‘most sought after location’. (Hyphens, unlike typos, are often scarce in these ads.)

If the kitchen has working appliances, it’s a ‘modern’ and ‘top class’ residence, and if there are windows it’s ‘filled with natural light’. Anywhere within 20 minutes of a shop offers ‘a world of convenience on your doorstep’, and probably lies ‘in the heart’ of somewhere – anywhere will do. Recently I came across the claim that a house was ‘in every sense of the word a dream home’. Let’s hope for their sakes that the new owners never wake up.

Though some houses are certainly beautiful and impressive, and might offer the odd surprise, I’ve never been astonished by one. But this is just another word for property advertisers. We’re not talking hover-homes in treetops here, or Batcaves brimming with futuristic gadgets, yet going by the language used in real estate blurbs, you might think astonishment is a typical reaction. I once saw an ad for an odd-looking house with a fussy lawn described as ‘an astonishing property’ with ‘a magnificent array of landscaped gardens which are meticulously maintained’.

Such breathless exaggeration, transparently pretentious, is of course just a sales pitch, designed to appeal to our desires for comfort, security, status, and so on – and to make us more willing to pay a lot of money. If the property is expensive, it’s likely to be ‘exclusive’; if not, it’s ‘affordable’ or an ‘ideal investment’. Even run-down houses can be made appealing, since they offer ‘immense potential’.

One of my favourite property ad lines is the following: ‘One can hardly believe that a property on this road would come to the market with such a realistic price tag.’ By realistic the agent means ‘comparatively modest’ – in this case, almost unbelievably so. But realism rarely gets a secure foothold in the language of real estate. Because property advertising is a dream home for hyperbole.

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

Recycling “sticky wicket” for the uncricketed
It makes little sense to talk about some legal clause being “a sticky wicket to try to go through”.  I suspect that Arnold and Elson are thinking of the OED’s sense 4 of wicket, glossed as “U.S. Croquet. A hoop.”

Language change and slang

Stop calling it curation
Stan Carey blogged recently on the used of curation to refer to the collecting and posting of links on the internet. Here’s a trenchant objection to the term and, for balance, below is the kind of thing that is being objected to (even if it is slightly tongue in cheek).

Content Curators Are The New Superheros Of The Web
Anyone who’s trying to keep their head above the proverbial “water” of the web knows that we need super-help…and fast. So anyone who steps up and volunteers to curate in their area of knowledge and passion is taking on a Herculean task.

Improve your English

Jubilant birthday to you!
“Jubilee” is a word that, surprisingly, comes from an ancient Hebrew word meaning “ram”: yobel, which came to apply not only to the rams themselves but also to the rams’ horns used for making trumpets which were blown on religious occasions.

Language teaching and resources

A film-based lesson about adjectives to describe character
This lesson is designed around a short film by Amy Krouse Rosenthal and Thought Bubble, and the theme of kindness.

Books, words, languages and dictionaries

Language: The Cultural Tool by Daniel Everett – review
The Pirahã people tend to confine their discourse to things they know about, and their verb forms can be suffixed to distinguish between hearsay, inference and observation. They have no perfect tense.

In Swahili, they call it …
When Shen Yuning announced he was planning to compile a Swahili-Chinese dictionary, most of his friends thought he was joking.

‘Welsh is a wonderful gift’: speakers of the language relish new support
In her first speech as commissioner, Meri Huws spoke of her vision of a Wales where speakers had the confidence to use the language and trust in the law to rectify any prejudice.

Just for fun

When silence is not golden
What other day of the week tries to convince you that a letter that is clearly part of the word “Wednesday” is not actually there at all? Does Thdursday try it, or Tuedsday? No, they don’t.

Every Wednesday here in the UK, we are treated to a piece of political theatre known as ‘Prime Minister’s questions’ or PMQs. For half an hour, the Prime Minster is obliged to answer questions from other MPs, and the traditional highlight of this event is a verbal skirmish between the PM and the Leader of the Opposition – currently Labour leader Ed Miliband. Last Wednesday, Miliband used PMQs to focus on changes to the tax system announced by the government in its recent annual Budget speech. Some of these changes had unintended consequences. Though barely noticed when they were first announced, their implications gradually became clear, so that they’re now seen as politically foolish because they brought maximum unpopularity for minimum financial gain – a classic example of an ‘own goal’. Miliband took the opportunity to put the boot in. He reeled off a list of the offending changes, and concluded with the latest example of linguistic inflation:

We are all keen to hear the Prime Minister’s view on why he thinks, four weeks on from the Budget, even people within Downing Street are calling it an omnishambles Budget.

And suddenly, omnishambles is omnipresent (and it already has an entry in our Open Dictionary). It is not a new word, though: it was invented in 2009 by Malcolm Tucker, the fictional spin doctor and foul-mouthed star of the BBC comedy series The Thick of It. Tucker used it just once, and  (like countless other inventive coinages) it seemed to disappear without trace – until now.

Omnishambles combines the prefix omni- with the old English word shambles, which started life as a singular noun (shamble), meaning a table or stall for the sale of meat. From the 15th century, it was used mainly in the plural, to denote a meat market – a collection of individual stalls – and visitors to the city of York can walk through a medieval street called The Shambles, which used to be full of butcher’s shops. From here, it also came to mean a slaughterhouse or abattoir, and from around 1600 it acquired a figurative sense, denoting – as the OED puts it – ‘a place of carnage or wholesale slaughter’.

Its current use, meaning a situation of great disorder, suggesting incompetent management, is relatively recent. Like most words of this type, it tends to be modified (or ‘amplified’) by words like total, utter, absolute, and – most frequently – complete … even when the subject is a trivial upset, as in this ridiculous example from our corpus:

The tea was a major embarrassment. Instead of tea we got a few cakes out of packets, no sandwiches at all!!! Staggering. Complete shambles. This should have been the best tea of the year!

Shambles is one of those unusual words (like moneybags or butterfingers) which looks plural but acts singular: a situation is ‘a shambles’. Not surprisingly, then, reports of Miliband’s speech all record him as saying, in the run-up to his ‘omnishambles’ climax:

Over the past month we have seen the charity tax shambles, the churches tax shambles, the caravan tax shambles and the pasty tax shambles.

But my colleagues and I at Macmillan, having listened to the speech several times, are all convinced he used the singular version (‘the charity tax shamble, the churches tax shamble…’), as if to indicate that each individual ‘shamble’ added up to a collection of shambles (or an omnishambles). So are we seeing the word return to its original singular form? Or is it one of those doubtful cases like Neil Armstrong’s famous line as he came down that ladder on to the moon? See what you think: the speech is here, and the relevant section starts at around 10 minutes 45 seconds.

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

Yours, sir, is a LAFA
In countries where English is commonly spoken, particularly those that suffered colonialism under the British, the ability to speak the Queen’s English is associated with a certain nebulous prestige.

Language change and slang

Hey Dude
I am not “Mr Lebowski”. You’re Mr Lebowski. I’m the Dude. So that’s what you call me. You know, that or, uh, His Dudeness, or uh, Duder, or El Duderino if you’re not into the whole brevity thing.

AP’s approval of ‘hopefully’ symbolizes larger debate over language
On Tuesday morning, the venerated AP Stylebook publicly affirmed (via tweet, no less) what it had already told the American Copy Editors Society: It, too, had succumbed.

Did he really mean literally dead?
18-year-old tweets that he is “Literally so dead” after first weekend of arts festival. Gets mocked.

Gone gay
Nobody is quite sure when gay shifted meaning from jolly to homosexual. It’s complicated by the fact that gay could also mean libidinous.

Language teaching and resources

8 Social Media Strategies for Your Classroom
Study after study has confirmed the benefits of networking. Before we delve into strategies, though, let’s look at some reasons why we should connect with students in this manner.

Cartoon: Hire a hoodie
This cartoon by Andy Davey from The Sun relates to a speech by UK Employment Minister Chris Grayling in which he called on bosses to give local youths a chance instead of hiring experienced Eastern Europeans.

Books, words, languages and dictionaries

Might makes right: The Godfather’s Italian table
“Godfather” director Francis Ford Coppola is a big shot — and not just in the film world. As a vintner and restaurateur, Coppola apparently sees himself as the capo di tutti capi — the boss of all bosses — who owns the Italian dictionary.

For Japanese Linguist, A Long And Lonely Schlep
Now Japan’s leading scholar of Yiddish, Ueda was originally a specialist in German. He stumbled upon the Jewish language while reading Franz Kafka.

Language learning helps to ward off dementia
New research demonstrates that learning another language could prevent the onset of the cognitive disease dementia.

Just for fun

Happy Quasimodo
The Inky Fool again, on an oddly named date in the church calendar.