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

Media must use correct English
There’s been quite a bit on the blog recently about coinages and neologisms. This Korean commentator takes a very severe view on Konglish.

Language change and slang

Literally – the much misused word of the moment
It’s like literally so misoverused. But whereas Jamie Redknapp gets the word nonsensically wrong, writers such as James Joyce knew exactly what they were doing with it.

Tiger bread renamed giraffe bread by Sainsbury’s
The UK supermarket chain Sainsbury’s has renamed its tiger bread “giraffe bread” – and all because a three-year-old wrote to them pointing out that the bread’s crust resembled a giraffe’s spots more closely than a tiger’s stripes.

Language teaching and resources

Polysemy in Winnie-the-Pooh and other stories
Once upon a time, a very long time ago now, about last Friday, Winnie-the-Pooh lived in a forest all by himself under the name of Sanders. (“What does ‘under the name’ mean?” asked Christopher Robin. “It means he had the name over the door in gold letters, and lived under it.”)

Spelling “stationery” and “compliment”
English has many pairs of words that differ only by a letter or two and are easily confused. Here are some handy tips to help you remember the spellings of two of these sets of words.

Books, words, languages, and science

The gift of tongues: what makes some people learn language after language?
How many languages do you speak? In a new book on people who speak huge numbers of languages, Michael Erard says that “true hyperpolyglottery begins at about 11 languages, and that while legends abound, tried and tested exemplars are few”.

Science decodes “internal voices”
Researchers have demonstrated a striking method to reconstruct words, based on the brain waves of patients thinking of those words.

Video

16 different ways to say “I like it”
In this video the winner of our Macmillan Love English Award for best blog, Luke’s English Podcast, takes you through some of the many different ways of expressing your appreciation in English.

In the previous post on this topic, we looked at the criteria traditionally applied by dictionary-makers when considering new words for inclusion. The question is as old as lexicography itself. When he wrote his Plan of an English Dictionary in 1747, Dr Johnson noted that it is ‘not easy to determine by what rule of distinction the words of this dictionary were to be chosen’. And having aired his ideas on the subject, he acknowledged that it isn’t always possible to make clear rules and then adhere to them strictly. 

The Oxford dictionary website also has a go at explaining its inclusion principles – this time by means of an elaborate flowchart which takes you through the various decision points. Having cleared numerous hurdles, the successful word is at last included in the dictionary ‘in due course’. I’m not sure I agree with every stage of this. For example, if the question ‘Is its use limited strictly to one group of users?’ is answered with a ‘Yes’, the word is consigned to a sort of purgatory where its behaviour is monitored for possible future inclusion. But dictionaries routinely include vocabulary typical of specific user-groups – the important thing is to apply an appropriate label to indicate that it is not part of the general language. On the whole, though, the Oxford chart gives a good outline of the key criteria: does the evidence come from a range of sources (what we referred to previously as ‘dispersion’), and does it have ‘a decent history of use’(the longevity argument)?

The problem is that the approach applied by both Oxford and Merriam-Webster is rooted in the past. It reflects the realities of print-based dictionary publishing – and those days are gone.

What has changed? First, what we’d call the ‘publishing cycle’. When dictionaries existed mostly as printed books, publishers would produce a new edition every four or five years. They collected new vocabulary as it appeared, but they could take the long view on whether something was worth including. We do things differently now. Consider for example the linguistic fallout of the global financial crisis that began in 2008 – just a year after Macmillan published the second edition of its dictionary. With the dictionary now mainly consulted online, we were able to add important new usages, such as the word credit crunch or the new sense of toxic (when applied to debts) – without having to wait several years. The second big change, which has been gathering pace since the turn of the century, is that the amount of evidence available to us has grown exponentially, thanks to the Web and social media. Thirdly, we’re no longer limited by space constraints. Even the largest printed dictionaries don’t have the infinite amounts of space that online media provide, so they have to be selective. That’s no bad thing: the removal of these limits shouldn’t be a licence to include just anything. But it does allow us to re-think – and broaden – our inclusion policies.

Above all, older notions about ‘what gets into the dictionary’ reflect the idea of the lexicographer as a gatekeeper, the belief that it is up to us to decide (on behalf of everyone else) which facts about language deserve the special status of  being admitted to a dictionary. This notion of the dictionary having special ‘authority’ (which it confers on the words it includes) is well-established, and still has wide appeal. But it may be incompatible with the priorities and expectations of users of the Web – especially digital natives. If a word is in common use, people expect to find it in their online dictionary, and they won’t be impressed by the argument that it first requires ‘a decent history of use’. For many users, in other words, speed and convenience, getting a useful answer now, may be more important than authority.

As in so many other areas, one of the impacts of the Web has been a challenge to the old top-down model of one ‘expert’ provider and many passive recipients. It isn’t simply a case of users expecting dictionaries to respond more rapidly to language change – many of them also want to be involved in the compilation process. (Wikipedia is the obvious analogy.) In the final part of this series, we’ll discuss the implications of ‘crowd-sourced’ dictionary content (already a central feature of Wordnik, for example, and of our own Open Dictionary), and we’ll also look at emerging language technologies which might just change everything.

Madonna’s recent moonlighting stint as a dictionaries marketing executive is still paying dividends: another thousand people have looked up reductive since we discussed it last Monday, and it’s been the single most looked up word for the last two weeks.

If you remember, Madge had said of a Lady Gaga song: “When I heard it on the radio, I said, ‘That sounds very familiar. It feels reductive.’ ”

But what exactly did she mean? It’s possible that she got the wrong word, and meant to say derivative. That would have been understandable in the context, and the interviewer would not have needed to ask if this “was a good thing”.  But it would have been a much more open criticism, and by using a word like reductive, she’s managed to create a mystique around the whole business. It’s either an accidental slip of the tongue, or very clever linguistically-driven PR.

Humans never outgrow a fascination with new playthings, but after a certain age it is unseemly and unrealistic to expect a steady stream of surprise gifts from doting parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. One consolation for this loss is new words: clever coinages come along all the time to supply our craving for novelty. A word, term, or phrase that was unknown yesterday can be on everyone’s lips in a matter of hours or days because it fulfills a human need: a new thing to have fun with.

The soberer side of this phenomenon is the province of lexicographers and dictionary publishers, who must decide whether a newly-minted word is of sufficient importance and longevity to be included in a dictionary. Here’s the dilemma: it’s a commercial dead-end for a dictionary to seem out-of-date and old-fashioned, but a dictionary that allows every fashionable word to climb onto its bandwagon will quickly lose the respect of its peers.

Language watchers may have noted a spate – perhaps it was only a spatter – of news stories six weeks ago, grandly proclaiming “Tebowing now an official dictionary word” or “Tebowing makes it into the dictionary.” It’s the sort of headline that makes lexicographers roll their eyes heavenward. The flutter of excitement, upon analysis, turned out to be in essence a promotion from a website, The Global Language Monitor, which has been involved previously in various schemes to call attention to itself by baiting journalists on a short deadline with faux news. In fact, Tebowing has not been added to any respectable dictionary, and it’s too early to tell now whether it will be.

What (in case you’ve been living under a rock) is Tebowing? It’s a word based on the surname of Tim Tebow, quarterback for the Denver Broncos football team. He’s an evangelical Christian and he manifests his faith, quite unconventionally, by genuflecting. Yes: genuflecting. English already has a word for what he does, but the novelty of its being done by a football player in uniform, combined with the easy convertibility of his name to a gerund and the fun of saying “Tebowing” certainly encouraged the coinage. A coinage, however, is a far cry from an entry as a headword, and it seems unlikely that Tebowing will appear in any dictionary soon. The word got a lot of airtime when the Broncos pulled off a number of heart-stopping, eleventh-hour victories, but they lost their bid to participate in their division’s championship playoffs. No amount of genuflection seems to have been able to change the fact that their opponents played better football.

A trip down short-term memory lane shows that fad words like Tebowing come along all the time – and they go with equal frequency. Do you remember cyberchondria? It gets about three hits today if you try it in Google News, but for a few weeks back in the day (5 years ago or so) it was nearly as frequent as Tebowing was in December. Snowmageddon had a heyday in 2010 when the East Coast of the US was blanketed in several feet of snow, but it left lexicographers cold and the word does not yet appear in any standard dictionary. Matrimania – hyping of all things related to marriage – seems to have been coined around the turn of this century and it enjoyed a few days in the limelight, but has hardly been seen since. People enjoy words like these when they come along, and today unconventional reference websites like Urbandictionary and Wikipedia provide a place to record them, but speakers are fickle. We soon abandon these novel playthings because we know that others will be coming along soon.

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

New words from noncelebrity neologizers
Why do some new words take off … and some fail? Neologism expert Allan Metcalf, the executive secretary of the American Dialect Society, gives five factors by which to judge the success of a new word: what he calls the FUDGE scale.

American dialects from A to Z
DARE stands alone as the most exhaustive record of regional speech in America, each page bursting with geographically nuanced information about the country’s diverse lexicon.

Language change and slang

A brief history of speaking about graduation
… just going back 140 years, we’ve seen transitions from graduated at to graduated from to the plain graduated. But there’s an even more substantial change in the history of graduate. Graduating used to be something a school did to its students, not something the students did to the school.

Teens on TV: are they talking your language?
Michael Rosen talks to EastEnders and Skins scriptwriters about how they reflect – and help create – young people’s slang

Language teaching and resources

European stereotypes: what do we think of each other and are we right?
As the European crisis ratchets up antagonism between countries, there has been a rise in name-calling and finger-pointing … The six newspapers in the Europa project were asked to stereotype each other, and then asked cultural commentators in each country to assess how accurate they are.

Books, words, languages, and science

UK: Lack of languages in schools concerns unis
“We believe that knowledge of a modern foreign language and the possession of intercultural skills are an integral part of a 21st-century education,” …

When Does Speaking a Foreign Language Get a Candidate in Trouble?
Every four years, it seems, one of the major issues in the U.S. presidential campaign is how many languages the candidates speak, the implication being: the fewer, the better.

Funny

Awesomely Appropriate (Albeit Alternative) Definition

Learning a rule or convention in language gives people a secure footing in an area of usage. When the convention is ignored or challenged, this can undermine the pocket of security and offend people’s sense of what is proper and necessary. This might help explain the levels of anxiety and outrage we see when, for example, the serial comma appears to be under threat, or when unnecessary apostrophes – such as the one in Waterstones’ name – are discontinued.

Minor matters of style and punctuation have a way of agitating people, and worlds of contention spring from trivial distinctions. Language usage is also a convenient scapegoat through which people can express their displeasure and unease with big business, youth culture, societal change, the anticipated end of civilisation, and so on.

One of the grievances people have about apostrophe use in particular is that doing it improperly leads to ambiguity. But Stephen Bullon, in his recent post about the Waterstones story, doubts that there is any “apostrophe-driven ambiguity in speech”. Language Log makes a similar point: that although languages are “loaded with ambiguity”, it’s not the kind that leads to genuine confusion.

So what does the future hold for the apostrophe?

Throughout its history, the apostrophe has been dogged by inconsistent use. There is no reason to think we can create a uniform system simply by demanding that people get it right, because what’s “right” is different for different people. Besides, when editors, linguists and lexicographers confuse its and it’s – and they do – there is little hope for less language-sensitive writers.

In a post here in 2009, Gwyneth Fox said she was beginning to think apostrophes should be abolished. But they’re too ingrained in everyday writing to be just done away with (unless you are G. B. Shaw). If they go, they will go gradually. Robert Burchfield, noting the prevalence of the mark’s misuse and the abandonment of it by many businesses, called it “only a moderately successful device” that was “probably coming to the end of its usefulness, certainly for forming plurals and marking possession”.

We may see a trend towards using it less where its absence doesn’t appear too odd. Well-known companies deleting it from their names will contribute to this shift, as will its omission from much informal communication in text messages and online chat, especially where character count is a constraint. Given our ever-increasing use of these forms of communication, the apostrophe situation could look quite different in a few decades’ time.

In 2011, there were 252 searches for the word reductive in the Macmillan Dictionary. So in the 7 days from 13th to 19th January inclusive, we would have expected to see 5.

In fact, we had well over 2,000 individual searches for the word reductive.

The reason, it would appear, was a comment made by Madonna with reference to a Lady Gaga song, Born This Way. In the course of an interview with Cynthia McFadden on ABC Radio, Madge said:

When I heard it on the radio, I said, ‘That sounds very familiar. It feels reductive.’

The interviewer, sensing that this might be a veiled criticism of Lady Gaga, asked if this was a good thing. Madonna ‘smiled coyly, took a sip of tea and said, “Look it up.”’

And a lot of people did just that.

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

When Words Are Neighbors
A word’s neighborhood affects not only the ease with which it is said, but also, according to researchers … the manner in which we produce it.

Language change and slang

Facebook’s Big Announcement
Rumor has it that the social network will be launching more apps based on the Open Graph and Gestures – that is, apps that let you “verb” any “noun” (read a book, hike a trail, ride a bike and so on.)

Totes Cray-Cray Abbrevs
Elizabeth observes …: Honestly, I feel like young people have always used slang words that “the olds” don’t really get and feel are a bastardization of the language. Would the tone of this list be any different if it was written in the 1960s about young people saying chick, bummed out, groovy or “cool?”

Language teaching and resources

Debate: Are you a teacher of the future?
English language teachers are often portrayed as being rather backwards when it comes to teaching and technology. I think that is true to an extent. With a few exceptions, the majority of language teaching isn’t exactly on the cutting edge of technology.

Infographic: The Big Mac Index
Coined ‘Burgernomics,’ the Big Mac Index has become a global standard of determining purchasing power between two currencies by comparing the cost of the McDonald’s burger in any two countries.

Books, words, dictionaries, science and the history of language

Leave Los Niños Alone! The Mental Costs of Linguistic Assimilation
… Aside from the most obvious advantage of wielding more than one language, there’s now a booming scientific literature suggesting that bilingualism is a bracing tonic for the brain.

Cognitive scientists develop new take on old problem: why human language has so many words with multiple meanings
“Ambiguity is only good for us [as humans] because we have these really sophisticated cognitive mechanisms for disambiguating,” he says. “It’s really difficult to work out the details of what those are, or even some sort of approximation that you could get a computer to use.”

Funny

Oxford police ‘lost for words’ by violence at underground ‘scrabble’ evenings
While some feel it simply a contemporary version of the early sport of scrabbling … full-contact lexicography seethes with a viciousness that makes this small basement under the Bodleian Library seem a world apart from the dreaming spires of Oxford only metres away.

Just went past a certain bookshop …

The Macmillan Dictionary got a mention in The Guardian yesterday, when Jane Martinson pondered the use of the word simper. A fellow journalist (male) had tweeted about a lawyer (female) ‘simpering’ at a witness (male) in the ongoing Leveson Inquiry. (The inquiry was set up in the wake of revelations that News International journalists had obtained stories by hacking into the phones of celebrities, politicians, and crime victims.) ‘Can anyone remember,’ she wondered,  ‘the last time a man was accused of “simpering”?’

She’s right. Corpus evidence suggests that simper is used three or four times as often about girls and women as about boys or men. Not only that, where the word is used about men, there’s sometimes an implication that they are not ‘real’ men (that’s why they simper): we hear from an American writer about ‘Simpering Frenchman Jacques Chirac’ (apologies to our French readers), and there are several cases of gay men described as simpering too. This happens a lot: the only people who flounce in and out of rooms are women (overwhelmingly), and gay men (occasionally) – but never heterosexual men. (I’m just reporting what the data tells us, so don’t shoot the messenger.)

As always, the co-text is instructive: simper appears with adverbs like flirtatiously, seductively, or sweetly, while other verbs found in the vicinity include fawn, pout, blush, and giggle – all words associated (whether we like it or not) with women. This example from the corpus gives a good flavour of how simper is typically used:

She preferred male company … and had no time for giggling, simpering girls who cared for nothing but gossip and the price of hair ribbon.

As Jane Martinson pointed out, the example given in the Macmillan entry has a female subject (She spoke in a simpering tone), and this takes us back to an issue we discussed last year, during Gender English month: should dictionary editors ignore the evidence and show a man in the example (as a way of combating gender stereotypes), or do we record what we find? No easy answers here, though we have to balance our gender-neutral instincts with a description of usage that’s true to the data.

Much has been written about words that blatantly insult women: slut, harpy, bitch and the like. But simper belongs to a more interesting category – words which belittle women, but which do it just subtly enough that (some) men think they can get away with it. Something similar is happening with feisty, another ‘suspect’ word mentioned by Martinson. Again, the data backs her up: feisty is overwhelmingly used about women, and the nouns it frequently modifies include heroine, redhead, tomboy (=honorary male), lady, gal, and even filly. On the surface, it conveys admiration – but this is qualified by the implication that ‘She did well – considering she’s only a woman’.

There is much more to be said on this subject. A man who is quiet and reserved, for example, tends to be described as taciturn – a word rarely applied to women – or even ‘the strong silent type’: both positive descriptions. A woman of the same type is just quiet, and probably also shy or even mousy. Or even simpering … Well, maybe we’ll come back to this another day. Oh, and thanks to Jane Martinson, too, for adding another word (twarrumph) to our growing collection of Twitter-inspired vocabulary.

The weekly roundup on Friday carries a link to a story about the renaming of a well-known chain of British bookstores. It’s Farewell to Waterstones’s and Hello to Waterstones.

Losing an apostrophe won’t make any difference to the pronunciation, but nonetheless the name change has been greeted with some outrage by some of the more linguistically conservative commentators – the chairman of the Apostrophe Protection Society was quoted as describing the change as slapdash.

In proper names, the presence or absence of an apostrophe seems to be somewhat arbitrary. One of the most famous shops in London has always been called Harrods, while one of the most famous supermarket chains is called Sainsbury’s – though of course the URL for Sainsbury’s won’t allow an apostrophe, so it’s sainsburys.co.uk. Both Oxford and Cambridge Universities have a St Catherine’s College, but while Oxford has college called The Queen’s College (presumably linked to one queen) Cambridge has a Queens’ College (presumably linked to more than one queen).

On the London Underground, (thanks to John Wells for these) you can go through Earl’s Court and then Barons Court; you need your apostrophe about you at King’s Cross, but not at Colliers Wood or Golders Green.

Given that in the spoken language there is no difference between Waterstone’s and Waterstones, and that there is never any apostrophe-driven ambiguity in speech, I’m inclined to agree with Gwyneth Fox that we might as well get rid of all apostrophes altogether.