So, somebody please tell me when the word fine stopped being fine?

When exchanging greetings with friends, I used to reply to any enquiry as to my health as ‘Fine, thanks’. When I still lived up North, a wry ‘Mustn’t grumble’ would usually suffice. This does not seem to be adequate any longer. People have begun to come back at me with ‘Just fine?’. What does that mean?! Isn’t fine fine anymore?

In the 1990s I worked for a US employer and there, uttering the word fine in response to a ‘HEY! How are ya?’ was tantamount to sharing suicidal feelings with a colleague. When asked how he was faring, my boss would gush in excruciatingly jolly tones, ‘I’m doing just GREAT thanks!’.  I find nowadays that my standard response is similar: ‘Great, thanks … you?’. Vicki Hollett talked about the difference between British and American meanings of certain words last week.

The thing is that fine these days just seems to mean ‘Oh, OK I suppose’, and it has also developed other, even less positive connotations:

‘So you won’t be able to make our anniversary dinner because you have to work late again? … FINE!’ – a declaration of war if ever I heard one.

Why won’t fine do anymore? Philip Kerr’s recent series on Hooray and Boo words in MED Magazine seems to sum it up for me. This is the concept that certain words produce a very definitely positive or negative response in a reader or listener. Everything has to be big and extreme and elicit an ecstatic response – otherwise we are not truly engaged, not truly alive. Why feel just fine, when you can feel GREAT? I just wonder what made fine slip to the bottom of the acceptably-positive league table all of a sudden?

The African Americans have reclaimed this word in a most inspiring way. They have taken it right back to its loveliest meaning. Not for them does ‘you look fine’ mean ‘you look perfectly acceptable’. They mean ‘you look FINE!’: think fine fabrics; fine jewellery, fine wines, kind of fine. I think these chaps have the right idea and that we should follow suit and make fine FINE once again.

If anyone reading this has found any words in the Macmillan Dictionary that have slipped or slunk from one meaning in common usage to another, please feel free to add such comments below – it’s FINE with me!

I feel I must begin this post by clarifying a couple of things. No, I don’t have a best mate called Tracey, and no, I’ve never in my life danced around my handbag in white stilettos in a nightclub. OK, glad we got that cleared up.

Non-native English speakers may be wondering what on earth I’m going on about, but the rest of you out there probably know exactly what I mean – the stereotypes that are associated with names.

As soon as someone hears your name, a whole slew of adjectives come to mind, some of them justified, some of them not. Introduce yourself as ‘Tristan’ or ‘Sebastian’ and people immediately think ‘wealthy’ and ‘privileged’, regardless of whether there’s anything to support that view. Tell someone your name’s ‘Kylie’, though, and they immediately think ‘working class’, simply because of the association with popular culture. ‘Sharon’, meanwhile, draws pictures of ‘party girl’ and ‘probably not that bright’ (much to my chagrin).

Sometimes these stereotypes can be simply amusing, other times downright misleading and annoying (consider the ‘not that bright’ one when you’re fresh out of college and trying to break into your chosen career!). Being named ‘India’ might mean your parents loved to travel, or even that you were conceived in India – it makes you sound exotic and perhaps a bit ‘hippyish’ – but if people automatically relate to you in that way, you could wind up feeling that no-one’s taking you seriously. (Even worse, if you’re called ‘Sky’ or ‘Storm’!) And just because your name’s ‘Kevin’ doesn’t mean you actually have to drive a Ford Escort with your name emblazoned across the top of the windscreen. How seriously is the salesman in the Ferrari dealership going to take you, once he finds out your name? All those zeros in your bank balance suddenly won’t matter a jot.

So, what words or stereotypes are attached to your name, and what’s the worst one you’ve ever been faced with (or, indeed, the funniest)? And how have you fought back against them? Years ago, a friend causally mentioned to me that I was ‘the most unSharon-like Sharon’ he’d ever met, so I decided the best way to beat the stereotype was to turn it on its head and just be as unSharonish as possible. It seems to have worked out OK – no-one’s ever that surprised at my dislike of nightclubs anyway!

Below are links to some of our most popular posts of the year. Many of the posts still have ongoing conversations so don’t hesitate to leave a comment!

Horrible Americanisms?
Who decides what is “good” or “correct” English when the way it is spoken differs from country to country?

Casting a spell on English.
Stephen Bullon’s series of posts on the English language.

Dude, where’s my definition?
So dude, do you surf? Do you ride the tail or prefer to have your toes on the nose?

Why it pays to hedge your bets in English.
Without hedges the social fabric of our nation would be torn apart; there would be constant brawling in post office queues across the land.

Bored of life? What Dr. Johnson didn’t say.
Samuel Johnson famously said that “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life”.

Are you lovin’ it?
Everything you know about the present continuous is wrong … it’s all Justin Timberlake’s fault.

I’m beginning to hate apostrophes!
If we can’t get apostrophes right, let’s do what Birmingham is doing and get rid of them completely.

Cardiganed old duffers? A lexicographer responds.
Let’s deconstruct this. First, you apparently have to be old in order to be a real lexicographer (not like those young upstarts who create dictionaries in cyberspace).

King’s English.
King says: ‘Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule’.

Pwn leet speak: a dynamic sublanguage and internet phenomenon.
Apparently, throughout human existence, males have demonstrated their mating fitness by inventing and displaying new and innovative communication forms.

Saying dates.
Why, for example, do we say nineteen hundred (1900) but two thousand (2000)?

Tim Bowen, teacher trainer and Onestopenglish author of the OSE-BuzzWord Lesson Plans, ponders the use & abuse of the word literally…

Don’t forget! Macmillan Dictionary and Onestopenglish have teamed up for a fantastic Christmas special for teachers in the month of December!

On a recent train journey, I heard a fellow passenger say to her companion:

“It was a nightmare. We were stuck in traffic for four hours. I was literally dead when I got home”.

My first reaction was to look across the train carriage to see if, by some remote chance, these words were being uttered by a ghost but, of course, the speaker was sitting there, larger than life and clearly not dead. Her use of the word literally to qualify the metaphorical use of dead in her statement, removed any metaphorical element from her utterance and rendered it literal and, therefore, in this particular case, utter nonsense.

Unfortunately, she is not alone. Arguably, the word literally is one of the most frequently misused and abused words in English. Often these abuses pass by without notice but, from time to time, examples can be heard that simply have to be confronted and brought into the public domain. Sport, and football in particular, is a field where commentators and participants are highly likely to sprinkle their speech with a liberal dose of literal references. One English football manager, when commenting on an unlucky defeat for his team, complained that “we were literally camped in their half”, conjuring up images of tents being erected mid-match in the stadium. A radio commentator opined that “As the clock ticks down, Belgium are literally playing in time that doesn’t exist”, introducing an interesting new direction in philosophical thought. A fellow commentator summing up a particularly one-sided game compounded the literal nature of his utterance by qualifying literally with quite when he said “The Bulgarians were quite literally not at the match”. Such nonsense is not confined to the world of sport, however. A BBC reporter came up with a wonderful image when he solemnly announced that “The police were literally swimming in a sea of red herrings”.

Well, it’s over. The Plain English Campaign 2009 awards were announced yesterday, and one of the winners was Lord Mandelson. Having left the cabinet twice in less than ideal circumstances, Mandelson is back in a position of some authority, and is seen as the government’s Great Communicator. But this observation, referring to the MPs’ expenses scandal, earned him the Foot in Mouth award:

Perhaps we need not more people looking round more corners but the same people looking round more corners more thoroughly to avoid the small things detracting from the big things the Prime Minister is getting right.

Congratulations, Lord Mandelson.

From the US, American Airlines walked away with a Golden Bull award for having sent a “Property irregularity receipt” to a passenger whose luggage had been lost. We have no information as to the whereabouts of the passenger’s sense of humour, but I imagine it would have come in useful.

The UK Department of Health also picked up a Golden Bull for this observation on disease prevention:

Primary prevention includes health promotion and requires action on the determinants of health to prevent disease occurring. It has been described as refocusing upstream to stop people falling in the waters of disease.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll want to read that a second time just in case you misread it the first time. So here it is again. Read and marvel:

Primary prevention includes health promotion and requires action on the determinants of health to prevent disease occurring. It has been described as refocusing upstream to stop people falling in the waters of disease.

But before you run away with the idea that Plain English Campaign is solely about putting the boot in, they also recognize good practice. The Birmingham Mail received an award for being Best Regional Newspaper; the Forestry Commission’s pamphlet about Lyme disease won an Inside Write award, as did the Royal Navy for its magazine Navy News: “a good example of plain English written for an intended audience.” And an award for being one of the clearest documents of the year went to the World Cancer Research Fund for a leaflet on breast cancer. You can see all the awards on the Plain English Campaign website.

And finally, back across the Atlantic, we find a tax form which the Department of the Treasury Internal Revenue Service sends to suppliers who are not based in the US. Obviously, if you’re a supplier and you’re not based in the US you’ll have been wondering just what kind of entity you are. A hybrid entity, perhaps? Or maybe a reverse hybrid entity? Don’t worry – the form makes things crystal clear with these two definitions:

Hybrid entity – a hybrid entity is any person (other than an individual) that is treated as fiscally transparent in the US…
Reverse hybrid entity – a reverse hybrid entity is any person (other than an individual) that is not fiscally transparent under US tax law principles…

See? Simples!

“Perhaps I could say, by way of introduction, welcome to our stakeholders. We look forward to our engagement, as we roll out our dialogue on a level playing field, so that, going forward in the public domain, we have a win-win step change that is fit for purpose across the piece.”

That was Dr Tony Wright, chair of the Parliamentary Public Administration Committee, at the beginning of a session during which the committee was to take oral evidence from four witnesses in preparation for a report entitled “Bad Language: The Use and Abuse of Official Language“.

Dr Wright’s tongue was firmly in his cheek as he uttered that introduction, but it’s a serious enough topic. According to the report, some tax forms are so badly worded that “unintentional errors” made by people filling them in result in around £300 million in underpaid tax each year.

Incomprehensible language has long been the target of Plain English Campaign, a group set up 30 years ago to combat “gobbledygook, jargon and misleading public information”.

They are announcing their annual awards on Tuesday 8th – both for best and worst examples of written communications. There is also a “Foot in Mouth” award, for “a baffling comment from a well-known person”. (Lord) Peter Mandelson and Britney Spears are both on the shortlist, and past winners include current Prime Minister Gordon Brown for a 1994 speech in which he covered …

… ideas which stress the growing importance of international co-operation and new theories of economic sovereignty across a wide range of areas, macro-economics, trade, the environment, the growth of post neo-classical endogenous growth theory and the symbiotic relationships between government and investment in people and infrastructures …

We could quote more but 45 words is probably enough of a taster and that sentence still has another 44 to go.

If it were not for the fact that he is a fictional character, Sir Humprey Appleby would have been a strong contender for a foot in mouth award. He was the permanent secretary who served Jim Hacker in the BBC comedy series Yes Minister (and later Yes Prime Minister as the hapless Hacker rose way beyond his natural level of competence).

In one episode, Hacker needs to know the identity of a civil servant who many years ago had made a decision that was now costing the government millions of pounds. The culprit is of course Sir Humphrey, but rather than say simply “It was me”,  (or even “It was I”) he embarked on this triumph of obfuscation:

The identity of the official, whose alleged responsibility for this hypothetical oversight has been the subject of recent discussion, is NOT shrouded in quite such impenetrable obscurity as certain previous disclosures may have led you to assume, but, not to put too fine a point on it, the individual in question is, it may surprise you to learn, one to whom your present interlocutor is in the habit of referring by means of the perpendicular pronoun.

I’d come across personal, possessive, relative, reflexive pronouns before, but perpendicular pronouns? Brilliant.

One of the downsides of being in the dictionary business is that most people have a completely erroneous idea of what we do. A recent article in the Times ticked all the boxes in its caricature of the lexicographer: old, “boffinish” and hopelessly outmoded (still working with card indexes, apparently), we are nevertheless seen as worthy guardians of the language, the people that everyone else relies on to repel the barbarians at the gate. And the corollary of this is that we are pedantically obsessed with “correct” usage: for lexicographers, we are told, “the words disinterested and uninterested are as distinct as lions and tigers”.

I hate to disappoint those whose default position is that the language is going to the dogs, but lexicographers (and professional linguists in general) are the least pedantic people you’ll ever meet. You only have to read David Crystal’s admirably sensible comments on text messages to see how a top-class linguist demolishes hysterical claims linking the rise of texting with the end of civilization.

So what do we think about disinterested and uninterested? It’s a hot topic, all right, with hundreds of thousands of Google pages devoted to pointing out the difference and warning the unwary against getting it wrong. Uninterested is uncontroversial, though it’s also rather uncommon – we’re more likely to use a formulation like not very interested, not all that interested or not particularly interested (our corpus has almost 10,000 instances of patterns like these, but only 852 of uninterested). Traditionally, disinterested means “impartial” and therefore in a position to make an objective judgment. We have 1,383 instances of disinterested and a clear majority show this meaning: the nouns it most frequently modifies are party, observer and spectator, and it is often used alongside other adjectives like neutral, impartial, and scientific. But many writers and speakers also use it to mean uninterested, as in:

Polls showed that most Italians were relatively disinterested in Berlusconi’s conflicts of interest between politics and business.

If you look in the Macmillan Dictionary, you will see that the entry for disinterested gives both common meanings, but it also notes – without comment or judgment – that many people disapprove of the second one. This looks like a good compromise: our job is to reflect the way people use language in real life, but it seems only fair to warn readers if a word is known to be contentious. That way, they can make an informed choice. But we don’t see it as our job to tell people what they should and shouldn’t say, and you won’t find any good, evidence-based dictionary condemning the “uninterested” meaning. And by the way, that use is not some modern aberration: the OED has this quotation from as far back as 1684:

How dis-interested are they all in Worldly matters since they fling their Wealth and Riches into the Sea.

So don’t shoot the lexicographers – we’re just disinterested observers.

The sad news that Chambers Dictionary is about to lose its lexicographic staff prompted a sympathetic article in the Times. Its author, Allan Brown, contrasted the efforts of Internet dictionaries (“pop-cultural hogwash”) with what he regarded as the work of “proper” lexicographers (“we know that our tongue is safe in their hands”). Very nice of him – except that his notion of what dictionary-makers do, and what we’re like, is wrong in every detail. For Brown, proper lexicographers are “white-haired, cardiganed index-carded old duffers … boffinish, pedantic and obsessed; for them the words disinterested and uninterested are as distinct as lions and tigers”.

Let’s deconstruct this. First, you apparently have to be old in order to be a real lexicographer (not like those young upstarts who create dictionaries in cyberspace). This will come as news to many of my colleagues. And cardigans are de rigueur: I have nothing against cardigans but have never owned one.

On to more serious points. It’s a common misconception that dictionaries exist to tell people what they should and shouldn’t say – to be prescriptive in other words – and the corollary is that lexicographers are hawk-eyed pedants ready to pounce on anyone who steps out of line. I have news for Allan Brown – well, not news exactly, because the notion that the lexicographer should be “an historian, not a critic” was first proposed by the Rev. Chenevix-Trench, one of the OED’s founding fathers, back in 1857. The whole point about a dictionary, Trench said, was that it should be an inventory of observable language use, and it isn’t the lexicographer’s job to select only “good” words.

Lots of people get steamed up about language, and the BBC switchboard gets jammed the minute any broadcaster splits an infinitive. But the interesting thing is that the complainers are invariably amateur linguists. Those of us who analyze language for a living are the very last people to make a fuss about the supposed difference between uninterested and disinterested (more on that subject next week).

Allan Brown may also be surprised to learn that the last time I used a “card index” was about 1983. We analyze massive language databases (“corpora”) using sophisticated software tools similar to those used by Google and other players in the language-engineering business. With these resources, we get an accurate picture of how people use written and spoken language in real communicative situations – and this is the raw material for our dictionaries (not a set of ill-founded prejudices about how words “ought” to be used). At a recent conference on e-Lexicography, the topics we discussed included search-engine optimization and the latest computational tools for mining language databases. The subject of correct usage didn’t come up once – most of us are rather disinterested in such matters. Of course, despite our increasing reliance on technology, lexicographers are passionate about language and want to learn more about the way it works. We make a conscientious effort to provide an evidence-based description of the way people use words, but the notion that the language is “safe in our hands” is misguided. We think it is perfectly capable of looking after itself.

Some people get very upset about nouns being used as verbs. A recent row in the press centred on the verbal use of medal (How many of their athletes were medalled at the last Olympics?) but it turns out that this usage is at least as old as Thackeray. Which is hardly surprising, since forming verbs from nouns is as standard a word-formation rule in English as you could possibly find – as anyone would know who had ever banked a cheque (or initialled a mistake on it), breakfasted in the garden, or texted a friend. What seems to cause special annoyance is the application of this rule in business jargon – as when someone tasks a colleague to action a proposal, or something impacts a decision (e.g. here, where this is described as a ‘grammar error’).

What gets less attention is a similar development where nouns are recycled as adjectives. Again, the business community is a prime ‘offender’, with its fondness for the adjectival uses of key (key personnel) and core (core competencies). Of course, nouns regularly function in an adjective-like way when modifying other nouns (think of school uniform or winter coat), but to make the transition (or, as some would say, to transition) from noun to adjective they need to be used in expressions like this:

In the telecoms sector, where new data services have been driven by technical capabilities rather than customer demand, this is particularly key.
Design is absolutely core to building on the area’s heritage and strengths.

Younger speakers, while immune to the fashions of business jargon, have their own favourite noun-like adjectives: rubbish is now well-established as an adjective (that is such a rubbish haircut), while quality has also made the leap from noun-modifier (a quality product) to full-blown adjective(the decor is so quality: the materials, the carpeting everything). My current favourite is genius, now hovering on the brink of adjective-hood (the bonus track is an absolutely genius cover of the Pixies “Where Is My Mind?”).

Does it matter? It’s true there’s an element of fashion and group conformity in the way some people use language, but on the whole the new usages are not created simply in order to annoy the language police: they arise because there is a gap in the language that needs filling. It is not, as some would have it, “lazy English” to say: “OK, who’s going to action this?” (instead of asking: “Who is going to take responsibility for ensuring that this plan is carried out?”). It is simpler, quicker, and probably clearer. Calling this kind of thing a “grammar error” is to attack the wrong target. The problem with the kind of jargon used in business and government is when it is deliberately used to disguise the fact that the speaker is incapable of having an original thought, or worse (as Orwell realized long ago) to conceal the speaker’s true, and more sinister, meaning under a fluffy cloud of clichés.

Read other posts about things people say that I hate.

I was recently visiting a primary school and had the great pleasure of sitting in on an assembly that was to be a celebration of some of the children’s fantastic work. It was also a chance for the pupils to bring in things to show to their peers as well. In a nice clear voice, the teacher presiding over the event announced “OK, children, let’s see some of the wonderful things you’ve bought in for us to see”.

I couldn’t believe my ears. Did she just say ‘bought’, surely not! Calming down and assuring myself that I had simply heard wrong, I reabsorbed myself in the exhibition. Several minutes later the teacher again repeated to a young girl “And what have you bought in for us to see”?

Now, this has to be one the biggest language crimes that can be committed. The offender here means to use the word ‘brought’ but instead offers the completely different word ‘bought’. The really galling thing is that this was coming from someone who should patently know better. But she is far from alone.

The sister crime to this is the use of ‘brought’ when the speaker means ‘bought’. ‘Where did you get those?” you might ask. “Oh, I brought those from that shop on the High Street!”

In my 10 years in the UK I have covertly carried out a personal survey to see how many people misuse these two words. I had never experienced this peculiar habit before reaching the shores of England. My wildly less-than-scientific study would suggest that about 20% of people use the word ‘bought’ when they clearly mean ‘brought’ and vice versa. What seems to be further shocking is that no one seems to mind! Oddly, few people seem to use both words incorrectly. It seems much more likely that they use one of these words to cover both situations – thus getting it right 50% of the time. Could it simply be that these people are so lackadaisical in their approach to speech that they couldn’t be bothered to learn the correct usage of both?

Most of you reading this will be thinking ‘yes, I hear people say that all the time’, but do you ever correct them? It’s almost so commonplace that you somehow feel like it would be cruel to point out the foible. Sorry I bought it up!